


Shahmaran

by foux_dogue



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Android Felix, Conflicted Dimitri, Cyberpunk, Cyborg Byleth, Explicit Language, F/M, M/M, Multiple Pov, Resistance leader Claude, Revolution, Sexual Content, Subterfuge, Unrequited/requited tension, Use of Khalid as Claude’s true name, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:00:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24060211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foux_dogue/pseuds/foux_dogue
Summary: Byleth is an eclipse: the joining of two worlds each founded in the principle that they remain eternally apart. In the world of man, a wretched place butchered into sprawling districts made distinct by their squalor and their splendor, she is power. For men like Dimitri Blaiddyd, scion of Fodlan’s sun-drenched heights, that power means defeating the insatiable Empire, and no matter the cost. For men like Khalid, trapped in Fodlan’s lowest and most derelict parts, she is the means to break the gilded ladder that has led some into paradise and forced others into hell.In the world of the machines, a species perpetually subjugated despite the spark of life they carry, she is the pinnacle; the divine. But just as the worlds of man and machine have been destined to be kept separate, so too does her own existence in some place in between put her at a far greater danger than even the war that threatens to destroy them all.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan, Unrequited Dimileth
Comments: 47
Kudos: 87





	1. Three-Layer Cake

Some people would call her an abomination. He wonders about that, sometimes: how they’d point and gape if she peeled back her smooth skin to show off the slick metal he’s put inside her. Coils and wires. It’s all just entrails. Offal. _What does it matter_ , he supposes he’d ask them. _What_ _does it matter, in the end?_

“Ah— _hah_ —ah!”

 _Fuck._

He grits his teeth and shuts his eyes to stop himself from looking at her sprawled across the tangled sheets; starts thinking about _pi_ and counting backwards from _.14_. It’s nearly impossible to tease her into moaning like that. Hell, it’s hard enough to make her _smile_. _The cost of flesh_ , he guesses he’d call it, if anyone ever bothered to ask him. She’s got no code to tell her how to feel— no 1s nor 0s neatly arranged to give her a fast-tracked lesson on orgasms. She has to figure that all out herself and sure, it’s been a few years, but learning how to be human takes time. And anyways, she’s a prodigy; a masterpiece and a master all rolled up into one divine. He can be patient for someone like that.

Besides, he likes the challenge. It’s always been one of his bad habits. When she’d first woken after he’d rebuilt her she’d looked at him with the same disinterest as if he’d just been a stain on the wall, and damn it if it hadn’t cursed him to her from the very start. Anyone with half a brain would have probably given up at month six of her inattention, but he’d persevered, and here has come his reward: sometimes, if his jokes are clever enough, she laughs. When he’s upset— really upset, the kind that makes him question if anything fucking matters at all —she frowns and grips his hand and squeezes until he cares again.

Each day is a battle between them and god help him if he doesn’t hope that it’ll be a hundred year war. Still, sometimes he wonders if he’ll ever gain the upper hand. It’s a good thing it’s just the two of them. If he’d ever had an army they would’ve all been deserters by now.

_Aw, fuck._

Even this doesn’t help. No matter how far his mind wanders she’s still there with him in that shitty room rented by the hour, her legs crossed around his waist in a vice that stops him from slowing his pace despite how desperate he is for it — a breath, a pause, another _884197169fucking3_. But if he cums before she does he’ll lose this battle, too, and his win-loss ratio is already pretty fucking dire.

“Byleth — baby,” he gasps, and grins when she scowls at him, all pink cheeks and cloudy eyes. She hates it when he calls her that. His retribution comes in the form of her ankles interlocking tighter. He gulps in another wavering breath and feels his soul start to peel away from his body, leaving only a white-hot molten mess of things behind.

“I can’t,” he admits, eyes rolling back in his skull, “I’m gonna—”

“Don’t,” she orders. She’s winded, but that doesn’t do anything to soften her whetstone tongue. It always hones her voice into something sharp. He’d laugh if he wasn’t so busy trying to keep himself together. Instead he moans when she suddenly wrenches him sideways with the flex of her thighs.

“Fuck,” he stutters. She’s merciless — shoves his back against the mattress as she resettles herself with her knees bracketing his hips. If he’d had any breath left in his lungs she would’ve knocked it from them. She’s blood and bone but she’s metal, too, after all. As lithe as she looks, she must weigh twice as much as he does, and that says nothing for her strength. If she wants to play grappler with him, he’s not going to be stupid enough to try and stop her.

“By,” he groans, the _y_ tessellating into a choked stammer as she rises up on her knees and grinds against him. His hands move on their own to grip her thighs. The supple flesh there pillows between the Vs of his fingers. _I’m gonna die_ , he thinks, and isn’t that what they call it, anyways? A little death?

“ _Ah_ ,” Byleth gasps. She rides him harder, the corner of her lip raised into a crooked snarl. “Yes, yes, _there_ ,” she begs, as if he has anything to do with it other than trying his damndest not to bite through his own tongue.

And what is he supposed to do, really, in a moment like that? When she looks like a religion of her own and him the only one there to worship her, and yet if he _looks_ at her — at the tangle of her pale hair or her bouncing breasts, pink-tipped and made blusher from when he’d teased her nipples between his teeth — he knows he’ll fuck it all up. But then again he needs to see it and to _remember_ given what’s going to happen next: empty beds and lousy nights and lots of time to himself.

“Ah, _Khalid_ , Khalid,” she says, the first name coming in a shout and the second in a rasping whisper. “Please. _Yes_.”

She tosses back her head until all he can see is the slender bow of her neck. It’s like he can follow the little packet of pleasure as it jumps between each synapse linking her brain to that tight, hot place he’s lost himself within: first in the bob of her throat and then in the swell of her chest as she sucks in a final breath. She sings it back out in a groaning _yes_ just as her body pulses and shudders around him. It’s a symphony; the rapture; the end times. _God_. She slumps forward slightly, catching herself with her palms against his chest. He bucks his hips and hears the heavens shattering into the earth and cries out her name in a reedy voice that’s in an entirely different pitch than the one he’s used to using.

“Fuck,” he breathes afterwards. She’s ready for him when he nods slightly forward to catch her in a sloppy kiss. It’s more teeth than tongue, but that’s alright. It works. It’s nice. He groans again when she slips off sideways from him, folding into a pile of limp limbs at his side while they both catch their breath. A little part of him mourns her already, the warm wetness of her drying on his skin.

“That was nice,” he says into the dark above their heads. It’d still been daylight when they’d started. The burning ache of his thighs can attest to that, too. _Insatiable_ isn’t the right word but he’d call her that, too, to be honest.

“Hm,” she replies. “Did you pay for the full night?”

“I can,” he offers. She shakes her head.

“No,” she starts. “I should go back.”

He knows she should, but that isn’t really the discussion that he was hoping for. He catches her by the wrist when she suddenly bends forward, steadying her before she carries on to gather her clothes from their scatter across the dingy carpet.

“Stay.”

He isn’t sure what the word is: an offer, a plea, an order. He supposes that they all suit the situation well enough if looked at from the proper angle. Byleth’s lips twitch into a secret shape that he knows from experience means that she’s smiling.

“What am I supposed to tell them?” she asks. It sounds like a challenge, but all the same she lets him drag her back into the bed. He snakes an arm behind her neck and slings the other across her, his fingertips tracing the ring of her navel as he considers her question.

“Tell them that you took a wrong turn,” he suggests drowsily. “One too many boulevards. There’s plenty of them up there.”

He tracks the proposed path himself, his finger running along one of the many thin scars that sketch out a second skeleton on her skin. This one travels from her belly up along the parallel of her spine. It’s the most important one of all of them; the very first cut he’d made.

“You want me to say that I got _lost_ ,” she huffs. She doesn’t sound incredulous, but it’s awfully close; maybe with a little more practice she’ll master it. It thrills him enough the way it is — the slight twang in her voice, the way her stomach tightens with the first hint of silent laughter. All of it is a revelation, as far as he’s concerned.

“Everybody gets lost sometimes,” Khalid answers.

“Is that the best you’ve got?”

He presses three of his fingers against the thick cicatrice between her breasts.

“Or,” he soldiers on, “you could tell them that you went to meet your maker.”

That wins him a properly wry sound in reply. He turns to his side so that he can get a better look at her. She watches him like a cat from the corner of her eye.

“I missed you,” he admits. It softens the sharpness in her face. “I _miss_ you. Don’t go. Stay here with me for a while.”

“That isn’t what you need me to do,” she tells him. She’s right, of course, but that doesn’t make it what he wants to hear. He sighs and buries his face into her shoulder, breathing in the smell of himself on her skin. When he’s this close he can hear the clockwork of her heartbeat— steady and slow and dependable. Sometimes he hears it even when she isn’t there.

“I know,” he murmurs defeatedly. Her fingertips ghost along his spine. He closes his eyes. “How much longer? How stubborn can that bastard be?”

“Stubborn,” Byleth says. Khalid huffs a bemused breath into her hair. She strokes through his own, pausing to tease a strand between her fingertips until it rolls into a tangle. He should tell her to stop, maybe, but he’s never minded her making a mess of things before. “We’re making progress, but he’s still fearful. You can’t blame him for it.”

 _Yes I can_ , he wants to snap, childish and indignant; _we don’t have time for fearful._

“Is there anything I can do to help?” is what he asks instead.

“Just be patient,” she offers. It sounds more like a sigh than a recommendation. “Eventually he’ll learn that he can’t fight alone.”

 _He’s not alone when he’s with you_ , comes another thought Khalid leaves unspoken. It’s not like it’s a secret. It’s the lynchpin for everything they hope to accomplish. Prince Dimitri has always loved her, even when she’d just been his dutiful tutor, and long before she’d fallen from Garreg Mach’s ivory towers to die in the ruins in which Khalid had found her. The fact that she’d returned to Faerghus five years to the day of her disappearance had been hailed as divine intervention — and divine enough, even, to rouse Dimitri from his raving, if only for just long enough to show that it could be done at all.

Their work of coaching Dimitri back into reason again has been a long and frustrating process. For months the would-be king dresses himself, and eats what’s been given to him, and deftly manages the bickering of his subordinates as they all struggle to survive the Empire’s hungry crush. But then the morning comes that finds Dimitri drowning in himself again, and so Byleth slips on the yoke of kingdom-keeping until he’s ready to take it back from her again. At first she and Khalid had entertained the idea that Dimitri would eventually come into his own, but now they know that the only way to build any sort of unified resistance against Adrestia is if Dimitri agrees to the countless truces that Leicester has been extending in his direction for years.

But maybe even Dimitri understands that a ceasefire between Faerghus and Leicester is simply the first step for Khalid to steal the Kingdom from him, and so even Byleth’s suggestions for the two of them to discuss the matter have been to this date entirely unsuccessful. Not that he’s wrong; Khalid, known in the upper districts as _Claude_ thanks to his own hometown’s ruined reputation, will snatch the mad prince’s crown from him as soon as it’s in his reach, but it’s not as if it’s because he’s in the habit of collecting them. The greater good and all of that — that’s all that matters. The Empire isn’t very discerning in who it crushes, either, just that it means to grind them all beneath its heel. And it’s funny, really, the way that conquest is such an equalizer.

“Be careful,” Khalid acquiesces. Byleth makes a sound at that as if to say that it’s nearly as absurd to suggest that she’s in danger as it is to contend that she’d ever lose her way. She’s right, maybe, or at least mostly. What’s without question is that she’s different — special — untouchable, even. So maybe that means she doesn’t need to be careful, or maybe — and this is what he thinks is more likely — she needs to be careful with everything.

“You’re the one who should be careful,” she counters, which is also true. “How’s your arm?”

“It’s fine,” he shrugs off easily. “You didn’t seem so worried earlier.”

She stiffens a bit at that. He likes to think that she’s embarrassed. He rewards the rare emotion with a press of his lips against her throat.

“It was sloppy,” she soldiers on. “To let yourself get hit like that.”

 _Ever the instructor_. He grins and rolls his eyes. She’s right, of course, but it’s not like she’d been there when he and the rest of the plucky Leicester Resistance Alliance had the misfortune of fending off an ambush. Not that it’d been much of a challenge, but not like he was really interested in killing that shy little girl with purple hair for the mistake of shooting him in the shoulder, either. He knows her type — forced into doing the things they fear the very most. Better for him to suffer a few crooked stitches than to carry the guilt of her death around.

“It turned out alright,” he argues.

“Six inches to the left and you would’ve been dead.”

“I understand how it works,” he sighs, leaning back to look her in the eye. “For people like me.”

She frowns.

“ _I’m_ like you,” she insists, because she must know that this is what he’s getting at, just like she must know that what she’s said is even more absurd than all of that nonsense before.

“Thank god you aren’t.”

She flinches at that. He ignores it, leaning forward to press a kiss against the eternal _tic-tic-toc_ at the center of her chest. He’d first heard it five years before when he’d been picking through the rubbish of the Gronder wastefield. At first he’d thought that it was a bomb. Of course, there weren’t so many men who would dig up a bomb if they heard one, but lucky for her that it’d been him. After all, a bomb was just a bomb — it didn’t pledge allegiance to any particular district nor dogma, and that meant that it could be just as useful for the Alliance as it’d been for whomever’d had the misfortune of misplacing it.

As it so happened, he hadn’t been so far off. But he certainly hadn’t been expecting to find the broken body of a woman hidden beneath all of that rust and rot. The sight of her twisted limbs and the brown flake of her dried blood had nearly made him sick at first. Blood meant that she wasn’t a machine, and so that’d meant that she was dead — the kind of dead you couldn’t solve by rebooting a motherboard.

By the look of it he’d guessed that she’d fallen from the heights of Garreg Mach. It hadn’t been so much of a surprise. That’d been back when the war with the Empire had first started, and of course the Empire had made it’s grand introduction by burning the old Church stronghold to the ground. Khalid and the rest of them had already found plenty of bodies down below. Poor bastards. There’d seemed to be something particularly depressing about the fact that they’d been thrown back into the slums when they’d died. Something backwards in it, maybe, for whomever’d had the luck or gumption to drag themselves up into the heights of the second Fodlan built in splendor above the shadowed ruins of the first, only to be buried in that rotten ground.

But then he’d heard it: _tic tic, toc toc_. Despite his stomach rising in his throat he’d knelt to hunt out the sound, and had nearly fallen sideways when he’d pressed his fingers to her crushed chest and had felt her heartbeat drumming back. A few nonsensical things had followed after: he’d listened for her breath, although she’d obviously had none; then he’d considered pressing his palms against her chest to pump her back to life, but she’d already had a heartbeat, so it wasn’t as much that, and worse because then he’d looked down and found that her legs had been torn at the hips from her body, so what in the hell would _chest compressions_ solve?

That had nearly chased him off. He’d never been superstitious, but that didn’t mean that he was stupid. Whatever she was, she wasn’t anything he’d seen before, and he’d seen more things with his green gaze than most anyone else worth asking. But then again, maybe that’s what’d tempted him into wrapping her in his cloak and carrying her home: curiosity, maybe even wonder. Divine intervention, just like Dimitri had said. That sounded more romantic, but most likely it’d been the part of Khalid that had sought out that bomb.

Whatever it’d been, he’d spilled her across the table in his ramshackle version of a laboratory and had pieced her puzzled body back into place again, pausing as he did to stop himself from retching all the while. It was only when he’d built up the nerve to cut open her chest, however, that he’d learned what she was. Truth came in the form of a withered heart and a second silver one, whirring and purring and pleased to seem him after he’d sliced her down the middle and had broken her last unbroken ribs.

This, of course, had been impossible. Everyone had been trying to do something like that, and for hundreds of years, ever since they’d started breathing life into machines and stopped calling them _things_. It’d always failed. Something about the fundamental difference between flesh and stone. Crooks and geniuses and madmen; they’d all been failed Pygmalions lording over an abattoir, and just because Khalid was a clever machinist didn’t mean that he was a god.

And yet — and yet — he’d refitted her spine and replaced her punctured lungs with their alloy counterparts, and then he’d remade the rest of her out of other shiny things. Then he’d sewn her up, biting his tongue at the madness of all of it all the while, and had found himself newly religious when she’d opened her silver-green eyes.

“If I couldn’t put your broken parts back together again,” he promises, his voice echoing against the softness of her breasts, “then I would keep you locked away. Safe from all of this.”

“Is that supposed to be romantic?”

“It’s the truth,” he replies with a shrug. She sighs and cards through his hair again.

“Well, I can’t do anything about _your_ broken parts, so be careful,” she tells him. “Besides, you do better work at a roundtable than you do on a battlefield.”

“So you want to keep me locked away, too,” Khalid challenges with a grin. He rises along with her chest as it bellows with a belabored breath.

“Yes,” she answers finally, and much to his surprise. He pulls back a bit to look at her. There’s a pinkness in her cheeks again. When he’d first rebuilt her she’d been a blank slate, but in the two years that’ve come after she’s learned what it means to live: smiling and laughing and frowning and crying, first, although she does them so rarely, and then the more complex things like lying through a game of cards and practicing dry humor. Khalid hadn’t intended to add lovemaking to her curriculum, of course, but then again he hadn’t meant to fall in love with her, either.

“I love you,” he tells her now. It’s as simple as it is honest. Her lips purse slightly at the admission. It’s not the first time he’s said it tonight.

“I love you, too,” she answers. It’s not the first time she’s said it, either. It still stupefies him each time.

* * *

They leave at dawn. Byleth knows that it’s a mistake. Dimitri has been seeing more ghosts lately, and they always seem to be the worst at night. She doesn’t doubt that he’s been seeking her out, and the fact that she has yet to answer his call means that he’s probably turning her into a ghost, now, too. And if that happens, then what will all of this have been for? 

But it gives Khalid comfort to have these rare nights together — stripped of all the things they wear to keep them safe, and pressed skin-to-skin so that the perpetual chill that the Upper Districts cast over Leicester below gets burned away by the warmth they share between them. She’s learned that it gives her comfort, too. It’s strange. She still hasn’t really learned how to categorize _togetherness_ or _longing_. Part of her understands that it’s an extrapolation of nourishment and hunger, but the rest of her — the softer parts, maybe, what’s left of her flesh and bone — knows that she’ll never find the same satisfaction from a simple meal.

The real question is if this bond between them is some form of salvation, or if it’ll be the thing that damns her to the same depths in which men like Dimitri linger when the night darkens into its most moonless parts. Watching Khalid dress himself doesn’t help her answer that question. She feels something tender bleed open inside her while he takes the steps to hide — dark boots, dark trousers, dark gloves, and a dark jacket lined with quicksilver stripes that scramble the surveillance feeds that are always searching him out. _I would keep you locked away_ , he’d said.

She understands the temptation. He’d been so gentle when he’d rebuilt her, after all, but it’d hardly mattered — she hadn’t felt the bite of his scalpel nor the burn as he’d cauterized her. But she’d seen him wince and writhe when he’d been hurt in the battles they’d fought side-by-side. He’s so _fragile_. The smoothness of his skin, unblemished compared to hers; that cocky grin always on his lips, and how they feel when they’re pressed against her throat, her palms, against the insides of her thighs. All of it might as well be made from glass. Just one mistake, one lucky shot, and she’ll lose him. _Gone-gone_ , the little sooty-faced urchins say, all theatrics and wide eyes. 

He catches her watching him and winks. She wonders if she’s supposed to wink back. How do you show that heavy feeling that’s cluttering her chest? What’s it even called?

“Ready, starshine?”

He doesn’t wait for her answer. It’s not like either of them has got the luxury of saying _no_. Instead he snatches up the slinky hood draped over a nearby chair and pulls it over his head. The thin fabric clings to the rounds of his brows and the bridge of his nose. For a second it’s just a grey mask but then it flickers to life, filling with strange blurred shapes that almost look like a face, but then not, and then again, cycling rabbit-quick between masculine and feminine and masculine again. It’s another trick he’s made to help them run away.

They’re always running — him and the rest of them, all of those poor, brave souls that make up the Alliance resistance force. They’ve kept the Lower Districts alive, but just barely. Without the support of Faerghus they’ll keep on running until they die.

Byleth sighs. It’s a trick she’s learned from him. Not so many machines sigh. It’s not like she’s got lungs. Khalid always tells her not to think like that. _It doesn’t matter what you’re made of_ , he says. The worst part of it is that he believes it. That’s another thing that makes him human: hypocrisy. 

She pulls on her own hood and follows him out the door.

It’s cold outside. It’s always cold. Khalid shivers and pulls his collar a little higher against his nape. Byleth feels the hair on her arms raise. _It’s vestigial_ , he’d once told her.

“Find Lorenz,” he tells her in a hushed voice. The clack of their footsteps swallows it up. She follows him as he leads her to his bike, hovering where he left it the night before. It’s an antique — and contraband at that, as impossible as it is to track with its slender fuselage and its silent turbine — but he keeps it running as neat and tidy as if it’d just emerged fresh from the line. “He owes me a report.”

“Alright.”

Khalid slings a leg over the body of the bike. She follows after, fitting like she’s made for it between him and the swooping curve of the handlebars. He pushes off from the ground. Leicester peels away beneath them. She watches it all disappear: the red-light district they’d emerged from all curled in on itself in crooked buildings knitted together with gaudy neon strings; the ramshackle _everything_ that comes after, brown-on-brown and packed so tight she can barely see the crowded streets. It’s all lit artificial down here. Fodlan’s built in a series of disks stacked on top of one another. Once man had built horizontal instead of vertical, but then the world had started to fall apart. They’re on the only piece that’s left, jammed between boiling oceans and brimstone, and so the only way to grow is up. Leicester’s one of the Lower Districts, but they aren’t really on the bottom — that’s the Abyss, a miserable place they don’t even bother to properly name — but rather on the surface, which is nearly as bad. Everyone dumps their garbage over the sides of the district walls, after all; only one way for it to fall.

As they climb higher Byleth can see the white glow of the lights strung over Sreng’s ever-busy mines; the naked blot where the Duscur District used to sit. Morfis and Dagda are the final two petals in the Lower Districts’ daisy. Khalid shifts his grip on the throttle and pulls them more properly straight-up. She hears the hum of the great engines which keep the Second Districts hovering above the Lower. They follow the winding path that Khalid knows will keep them hidden. This time they’re passing through Almyra.

She sees the bottom of it first; the blue rings of the magic or science or whatever it is that hangs the massive thing in the air. Then comes the crumble of concrete and steel that makes up the fake earth upon which they’ve built their floating cities. Higher, higher, and then they see the spiderwebbed streets and alleyways of Khalid’s hometown— a little cleaner than Leicester, but twice as pockmarked by old punishment dolled out by the likes of Faerghus or the Empire, depending on when and who you ask. Places like Almyra and it’s cousin Brigid fly a little closer to the sun. It’s no wonder they get more burned.

Khalid has never been the nostalgic type. He doesn’t turn to watch Almyra unfold and then disappear again into the morning smog. They simply keep climbing higher. Soon she hears the hum of the First District looming above them. It’s looped in a double halo — the red ring of the scanners below and the golden light of the dawn above. The former is an insurmountable obstacle for most people like them. Those all-seeing eyes can pick out an intruder and force them back into the shadows long before they’ve even set foot on the neat lawns of the Faerghus or any of Adrestia’s fine marble. Their Crests— that strange stamp of privilege that hadn’t been meant to live in the dark — are what blind the cameras winking at them. She doesn’t know why Khalid has one, just like she doesn’t know why she does, either, but it’s been convenient. Lucky. Khalid knows a whole lot about luck.

The haze from below bleaches into soft, white, benevolent clouds. She feels Khalid draw in a deep breath against her back. What does it feel like, she wonders; she can’t remember now, not from before, when she’d still been a master of respiration herself. Surely it’s better up here than it is down below. Each one of their rides between the districts makes her feel like she’s crawling through some cursed version of a three-layer cake — black and sludgy on the bottom and whipped merengue on top. She wonders if that means that he’s always suffocating, or if it’s just that he’s starving.

They make it to the top. Faerghus had been beautiful, once. She can still see it at that height — the old-growth forests and the neat boulevards now studded with blockades. At first some of the district’s bruises had been from Dimitri’s paranoia, but now the Empire, eager to consolidate the First Districts from Faerghus and Garreg Mach and Adrestia into Adrestia alone, has started to make his militant anxiety honest.

Khalid drops them into an overgrown corner of the wood growing around Faerghus’ royal quarter. Byleth’s nose fills with something rich and spiced. Her brain tells her that it’s pine resin and dark soil and all of those rich things left to molder beneath the needles.

“Here we are,” Khalid says cheerily. His gloved fingertips draw over her body as she dismounts. He stays where he is. This isn’t the place where he can linger like he usually does.

“Be careful,” she says once more, pulling the hood from her head and stuffing it into her pocket. 

“If you say so, darling,” he agrees. He always gets this sugar-sweet when he’s reluctant to leave her behind. She huffs and steps forward to peel up the bottom of his mask. The camouflage’s mirage pools around the folds. It makes her a little dizzy when she leans forward to kiss him. He grips her there, just for a moment, the tightness of his fingers on her nape betraying his cocksure tone.

“Lorenz,” he reminds her when she steps back. He puts the hood back into place. It isn’t much of a romantic departure. This isn’t the place for that, either. She watches him leave and then she turns, walking with a brisk step towards the world outside.

* * *

Felix finds her first. It isn’t a surprise. They’ve always been good at finding each other. She thinks it has something to do with frequency. To be fair, she’d been the one to see through him first — on the very day of her return to Faerghus, in fact. She’d lived there for twenty-one years, but when she’d finally come back all of it had been as new to her as if she’d been a newborn. She’d had to rely on what Khalid had told her. _It’s old_ , he’d said; _it’s rich; it’s falling apart. The Kingdom of Man, they call it. They’ll kill you if they find out what you are._

So what was a machine like Felix doing serving at Dimitri’s right hand? She’d asked him that very question in the first moment when they found themselves alone. Felix had looked so terrified by her inquiry that she’d been convinced that he’d try to kill her or himself or the both of them for good measure. The only way she’d been able to calm him down had been to prick open the back of her arm to show him Khalid’s handiwork. _You’re bleeding_ , he’d gasped. That’s when she’d remembered that she wasn’t like _him_ , either.

“You’re late,” he snaps at her now, all fury beneath the neat drape of his royal uniform. She’s wearing one of her own; handsome and heather-grey and severe, just like their master. “Where were you?”

“Away,” she answers, expertly matching his own stony tone. Felix narrows his eyes. He knows what she is, but he doesn’t know what matters: why she’s there, to whom she answers, what she really wants. They’ve been exchanging secrets for years, but despite the trust that’s built between them she isn’t ready to share Leicester with him yet.

Felix’s secrets have been much easier to collect. He offers some of them to her himself, but the rest comes in rumors and gossip and common history. His father Rodrigue is the second most powerful man in Faerghus — or had been, when Dimitri’s father had held dominion. He’d had a son, Glenn, who’d been every part his protege. Some had even whispered that when Dimitri came into his own it might have been at Glenn’s feet and not the other way around. At twenty-three, just when he’d been blossoming into his most impressive self, Glenn had died alongside the old king of Faerghus and Faerghus itself, depending on who you asked. Two years later Rodrigue had brought his younger son Felix to court and introduced him as though he’d been at his heels since he’d been in swaddling clothes. Everything had been in shambles, then, and so no one had contested the fact that none of them had remembered a second Fraldarius son, and particularly not one who had been such a mirror image of the first.

 _They’re naive_ , she’d told Khalid once; _they believe what they want to believe_ , he’d disagreed. _Whatever it takes to get them through another day._

“Hey there, Professor!”

She turns and spots Sylvain’s red hair like a wildfire against the green of everything else. He trots across the field that separates the royal palace from the wilds behind it. She has three allies in this place: Felix, because of the contingency of their shared secrets, and Lorenz, thanks to Khalid, and Sylvain, because she thinks that he genuinely enjoys her company, and because he’s in love with Felix, and because he seems to be the only one smart enough in all of the First Districts to understand what she and Felix are just by looking at them.

“Oversleep?”

He slings his arm around Felix’s bristled shoulders with the question, offering her a lopsided smile that reminds her of Khalid. She knows there’s some half-hidden joke about her sleeping in the forest lingering between them, but she’s never been the type to tolerate that sort of thing. Sylvain knows that, of course, although he seems a little disappointed at the lost opportunity.

“His Highness has been asking for you,” Sylvain adds. His smile withers. “Edelgard’s been broadcasting some sort of propaganda across the southern border. He hasn’t taken the news well.”

Byleth frowns. 

“Take me to him,” she answers tersely. Sylvain slips off from Felix to dip into a flourishing bow. They all play games like that when they’re nervous. She and Felix stalk forward and very nearly leave him behind.

“Guys — _hey_ ,” Sylvain laughs, stumbling after them. She supposes it would be easier to focus on the comedy of the moment than the truth of everything else: the smoke on the southern horizon and the black hole that’s pulling her into the palace’s hermitage. It’s already towering over them, the windows boarded over and the air blistering with a scanner-net to keep out all of the ghosts. They pass through the latter and for some reason Byleth tenses, as if this time she’ll finally be found out. _Exorcised_ , they used to call it. Maybe that’s the right word.

* * *

“My teacher,” Dimitri rasps at her when she finally slips into the dim of his room. It’s dark and cluttered, but for some reason it always smells clean. Sterile, even. For a long while she’d wondered if the prince was like Felix. Perhaps the first version of him had been lost, too. He certainly seems that way when he fights; fearless, if reckless, but always unflinching, and no matter how much he’s been torn apart. 

_No_ , Khalid had once promised her when she’d broached the idea. His eyes had looked sad enough for her to be convinced that he was being honest. _He’s just a man._

“I feared that you’d finally slipped away from me,” Dimitri continues. Byleth minces across a shattered set of dishes to make her way to his side. Most people don’t like to get too close to him when he’s like this. He’s intimidating, tall and broad-shouldered as he is. She supposes it has something to do with survival instincts. Then again, things like her aren’t built with fight-or-flight.

“Of course not,” she answers flatly. She glances over at the tight tuck of the sheets on his nearby bed and frowns. “You haven’t slept.”

“Of course not,” he mimics. “Have you not heard the news? Edelgard has called for my head. If I sleep she’ll find me. She’s crawling through the walls.”

“Dimitri,” she chides him. His pale eye flickers in her direction before settling on an expanse of empty space. He makes a gesture and wills a crackling screen of light to manifest itself there. It’s full of white noise for a moment, but then it shivers and transforms into a video feed of what Byleth recognizes as the Gaspard neighborhood, one of the last sectors that comes before the border wall splitting Faerghus from Adrestia. The screen shudders again and then its joined by audio: a steady, booming voice spoken from some invisible mouth that preaches Dimitri’s inadequacy and then recites the Imperial doctrine.

“She says that hers is the only righteous path,” he says, his voice low and hollow. “The only way forward to redemption. Tell me, teacher, and so what does that make me?”

“It’s propaganda,” Byleth replies. “Propaganda can say anything. It’s not used to speak the truth.”

“A devil,” he continues. “Abaddon.” He reaches out for her. His movements are timid, hesitating. He’s a little boy groping for a blanket during a thunderstorm. She steps into his palm, letting him draw her closer. Even sitting he nearly towers over her. He dares to look at her only for a second before he crumples forward to rest his brow against her breast.

“If I lose you, it will be all that I have left,” he whispers into the fine weave of her uniform. “A devil. If you leave and take your light from me... Darkness. That’s what I’ll be.”

She doesn’t answer. He isn’t waiting for her voice. He’s listening to her heartbeat. It comforts him in times like these. _Tic tic, toc toc._ That isn’t what a human heart sounds like. He must know it, too. Khalid had once told her that when he’d found her he’d been looking for a bomb. _Tic tic. Toc toc._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please come say hello on twitter @fouxdogue!


	2. Sunflowers, and Where to Grow Them

His head hurts. He knew it would. These long nights he keeps for himself can’t be good for anyone. The endless cups of tar-black coffee he drinks to fuel them must be even worse. More often than not he eats like shit, and on top of that he’s got the dumbbells of everything else stacked on his shoulders. It’s all a balance. Liberty’s scale. Sometimes the only way he can tip it into _sleeping_ is to swallow enough booze to weigh down the other end. Last night it’d been a bottle of gin that might as well have been turpentine. An amateur move. Nobody in those old films about heartache drowned out their sorrows with gin. It’s always whisky. Scotch. Old, smoky, refined. Cigars and well-oiled wooden bars with lovers’ names carved into the sides. Leicester doesn’t have any of that, of course— barely has enough meat for a Sunday meal.

“Shit,” Khalid mutters without much conviction, shoving down the plunger of his ancient coffee press as he does. He pours the murky stuff into a mug with a dried brown ring at the bottom. The coffee burns his tongue and better that it does, to be honest. You can’t buy coffee beans in the Lower Districts that haven’t already gone rancid by the time they’ve made it all the way down.

He slumps into an ugly, mustard-colored chair and nurses his liquid breakfast, eyes unfocused on his naked toes as he considers his day ahead. What he was thinking before, it’s not really the truth. He’s busy. It’s always been that way — not enough hours in the day and even less at night. It’s just what comes with being on the losing end of a war. None of that is new. It’s old enough, even, that he’s stopped having nightmares about being blown apart. No, he’d gulped down those gins-without-tonic last night because of his bruised ego and his battered heart.

It’s stupid. He’s too old for this shit. Has too many people relying on him for him to be selfish. And what’s worse is that it’s not like he’s some lovelorn Romeo. Byleth cares about him. She tells him that she loves him. He’s not sure if she’s just parroting what he says back at him, but then again, maybe that’s how it is with everyone. And he’s the one who’d concocted this whole fiasco with Dimitri when he’d learned that she’d once been his tutor and the prince her ingenue, so it’s not like he can blame anyone else for it, and certainly not her.

But it would be easier if it was different. He’s not thick headed enough to think otherwise. Why else would they be sticking their foot in this war? The Empire hadn’t thrown its gauntlet at the Lower Districts, after all. They were just supposed to be collateral damage crushed when one of those two giants above them fell. But then Khalid had gotten the bright idea that he wanted to live a proper life — and that everyone else deserved one, too. Sunlight. Gardens. Clean water. Husbands and wives waiting to welcome you home in a clean-swept two-bedroom, two-bath, all _how-was-your-days_ and cheek kisses and the pitter patter of kids down the stairs. Kids who can read — who don’t lose their fingers in the cobalt mines, who don’t spit and smoke and drink at nine and die of old age at fourteen.

It doesn’t sound so crazy when he thinks about it like that. All he’s got to do is survive for long enough to make it happen, right?

“Khalid?”

A voice through the door. Only a few people call him that. The rest of them don’t like the taste of the letters in their mouths, not even down here in the dark. It’s not really their fault. Bad news always spreads better than the good. Besides, when you’re at the bottom of the totem pole you get desperate for a scapegoat, for the chance to say _at least I’m not_. Almyra was the only place that didn’t mind wearing scarlet letters, so of course they’d taken on the task. Khalid gets it. It doesn’t really bother him, either. He just wishes that it hadn’t’ve fucked up his name, too.

“Yeah — hey,” he manages, his voice a little rusty. “One second.”

He downs the last bitter swig of his coffee and stands from the chair, pulling a shirt over his shoulders and briefly considering shoes before he pads towards the door. It creaks open — hinges need oil, he keeps remembering and forgetting — and finds himself staring Ignatz in the eye. An honest smile scribbles across his lips. He likes Ignatz. Even when he’s asking for something, he always has the decency to look contrite.

“I’m sorry,” Ignatz lets slip before either of them has a chance to say hello, “I know it’s early, but I’m supposed to go to Myrddin with Raphael this afternoon, and...” He swings his limp left arm with the shrug of his shoulder. Khalid feels a guilty pinch in his gut.

“Aw, Ignatz. That old thing again, huh?”

He steps aside to usher Ignatz in.

“The Market’s quality’s been lousy for weeks. I should have used something else. Here, let me see what else I’ve got.”

“It’s really alright,” Ignatz replies, a little flustered like he always is, peeking through the glitter of his glasses at him before glancing away. “I can always just wear a sling.” He’s fiddling with the weight of his arm. The wrist of his right sleeve has a fleck of something sunny-colored on it. Khalid’s smile tightens into a grin. 

“Painting again?” Khalid asks as he turns to hunt out his vast collection of trinkets and gears. His place isn’t much of a lab, but it passes for a respectable apothecary. He shuffles open a trio of drawers, digging through neat bundles of meshed wire and a set of tiny pistons that could outfit a ship in a bottle.

“What? Oh,” Ignatz peeps behind him. “Y-yeah. Just some landscapes.”

“What sort?”

“Sunflower fields,” Ignatz admits. There’s a newly dreamy tone in his voice. Khalid knows he must have seen them himself before — a picture, that is — but he can’t imagine what they look like now. Yellow, apparently.

“You’ll have to show me when you finish,” Khalid counters. He picks what might just work from his collection and turns again to face him.

“They’re only studies,” Ignatz deflects. “It’s nothing serious.”

“That makes them even better,” Khalid insists. “Something not so serious sounds pretty nice to me.”

He pats the clean top of the work table that takes up most parts of the room. It came with the building — was the reason why he’d sprung for it, even — too massive to possibly be moved. Khalid’s not so sure what sort of life it lived before he showed up, but he hopes that it wasn’t something like a morgue. The utilitarian design and all of the well-worn stainless steel leaves him less than convinced.

Whatever it once was, Ignatz takes no issue in following directions now. He eases himself onto the table, his feet just barely brushing the ground. It almost looks like he fights the urge to kick them like a little boy dangling from a swing. That makes Khalid’s grin stick around.

“Your jacket,” he suggests next.

“Ah,” Ignatz stutters, “right.”

He quickly yanks the zipper down the middle of his jacket and, thanks to Khalid’s assistance with dragging his lame arm from its sleeve, shucks it off to the side. Now he really looks like he’s half his age, all knobby shoulders and the thin cotton of a t-shirt that’s probably supposed to be white but has got that overcast grey to it just like everything else down here. _Poor kid_ , Khalid thinks, although neither of the words actually suits him.

“What’s in Myrddin?” Khalid asks. He’s learned that it’s important to keep people talking in times like these; helps with nerves. There’s probably some sort of irony in that, but he prefers to take it at face value. He rests Ignatz’s left hand in his own, flexing his fingers to test the tension before he traces a near-invisible seam up from his wrist into the corner of his elbow.

“Anna says she’s got a new thoron shipment in,” Ignatz answers.

Khalid nods, his eyes still downcast. He might not know what sunflowers look like, but he’s intimately familiar with thoron; that blue static someone more clever than him had learned to capture with a combination of liquid nitrogen and luck. When it’s cold it turns into a sludge that can power most anything. It’d be a modern marvel if it wasn’t so goddamned finicky. The Upper Districts don’t use it. It’s not worth it for them to risk blowing themselves up for an afternoon drive. The stakes are a little different down on the surface.

“Shit.” Khalid chews over the word like it’s a gob of hard candy between his teeth. He pushes down on a spot just below Ignatz’s bicep when he does. There’s a satisfying click and then a hiss as a panel lifts from Ignatz’s forearm and slots back to give him a view of the tidy wires below. “Be careful.”

“I know,” Ignatz says. He keeps his eyes over Khalid’s shoulder. Khalid understands. It’s unsettling to see yourself spread open like that. “But it’ll help. Marianne’s lost power again last night.”

That’s not good. Khalid’s patients can manage being left in the dark. Marianne’s can’t.He frowns, but keeps himself focused on the task of carefully pushing a band of wires aside to get to the brace of Ignatz’s titanium skeleton below.

“Everyone alright?”

“I think so,” Ignatz answers. “But better to get the lights back on as soon as possible.”

“Right,” Khalid agrees with a quick nod. He runs a fingertip over the little chip that’s made Ignatz one-quarter paralyzed. This isn’t the first time he’s come to him for the problem. It’s starting to frustrate him that he can’t seem to get it right. Ignatz has a good build. Some people would call him a bit of an antique, but he’s using the same set-up as the newer models. Multiple chips connected to a core processor is what _newer_ means; it also means faster and more efficient, which are critical words for military grade machines like Ignatz.

The challenge with multiple chips is that they’re multiple, which is to say that they’re made out of variation and _variation_ , as far is Khalid is concerned, is any machinist’s worst nightmare. It’s a bit of a blessing, too, although in different ways; for instance, maybe that variation is why Ignatz is such a shitty soldier and such a fantastic landscape painter. Not that sunflowers had been the reason why the Kirstens had invested in him, but it’d certainly made him a better companion for Raphael after the rest of them had been gunned down. Although then he supposes one could ask if the gunning would have ever happened if Ignatz had been a better representative of his coding, but then that’s how variation plays out with fate, too, and fate isn’t exactly the sort of thing you can fight, now is it?

“When did it go out?”

“When I was sleeping,” Ignatz replies, shrugging his good arm when he does. “It was fine last night. When I woke up it was already like this.”

Khalid nods. It takes all of his gumption not to let out a deep sigh. The chip’s garbage. He would have replaced it months ago, but Yuri hasn’t had anything like it to sell for months ago plus too many months more. He’ll have to ask him again. Maybe this time he won’t be so good-natured with the request. _Gullible_ could be another word. No doubt Yuri has buyers with deeper pockets than his. The whole thing is a fucking racket.

“Sorry,” Khalid says next, his headache resurfacing at full force. “We’ll have to go old school for awhile. This isn’t your dominant hand, is it?” Ignatz shakes his head.

“No. I can manage.”

“I’ll try to find you a new chip as soon as I can.”

“It’s alright, Khalid.”

 _It isn’t_ , he thinks, gritting his jaw. He doesn’t like the idea of watching half of Leicester go lame because they can’t get what they need. And the other half is starving, and so what that really means is... Well, he doesn’t want to think about it. Not with the way his head is pounding.

“Don’t push it today,” he continues stubbornly. “Not until you get used to the lag. Can you bring anyone else with you?”

“Raphael can manage it alone,” Ignatz admits, “just that he doesn’t like to do _anything_ alone. You know how he is. It’ll be fine.”

This time Khalid does sigh. He leans sideways to snatch a soldering iron, too. 

“Okay, then. Ready?”

Ignatz’s brows furrow slightly at the question. Then he nods, but not before he makes sure he’s looking as far over his right shoulder as he can manage. A swell of nausea sweeps Khalid’s stomach. He isn’t sure if it’s sympathy or just the gin again. Could be both. He flips a needle nosed tool between his fingers and positions it to pry the chip from its roots in Ignatz’s arm.

It’s strange. People like to think about machines as if they’re just people, too, except for the part where that means that they shouldn’t be treated like chattel. Man has built them in his image, after all. Maybe it’s narcissism that made it happen; maybe it’s just a fundamental lack of imagination. Machines don’t eat, for instance, but they’ve got the space for a stomach and mouths filled with thirty-two useless teeth. They’ve got skulls, too. When people try to stop them — or, more often than not, _punish_ them — they always shoot them there. Blam. Right between the eyes. The only thing _that_ does is put a premium on replacement pupils and artificial cartilage.

Because listen — why would a machine have a brain? There’d been a time when all of that grey matter had been seen as the most superlative thing in the world, but hell, they’d once thought that lightning was the wrath of an angry god, too. And anyway, that probably has to do with narcissism, too; after all, what is Khalid, really, other than soggy neurons?

Machines are different. They’re more flexible. That’s the thing — if you’re gonna have variability, you better be flexible. The things that make them _them_ don’t live in any one part inside them. It’s data, and data’s like air. It can go anywhere. So it does: floats between chips and digital synapses. Repurposes itself. Here, think of it another way. They’re like a nautilus. When they’re safe and happy they peek out from their shells, but if you try to hurt them they can wind themselves up until they’re safe again. You can chip away at them, but it’s damn hard to get all the way to the center of that shell in order to actually do any damage. One time Khalid had even reprogrammed a unit from a disembodied hand. Good on them for making guillotines obsolete, he thinks.

Still. Ignatz has twelve chips scattered across his body, and that’s where his data likes to sit when everything’s peachy-keen. Now he’s going to have eleven, and Khalid can’t shake the feeling that he’s only going to be eleven-twelfths of Ignatz once he pries it off. How long until he’s only five-sixths? With the way that everything’s been going lately, is the day going to come when Raphael keeps his best buddy in a pinky stored in a locket strung along his neck?

 _Click._

Khalid lifts off the chip and sets it onto a square of gauze at his elbow. Then he picks up the soldering iron again, settling into his work of rigging Ignatz’s arm so that it obeys the chip in his spine instead of the one it’s just lost. It’s not so difficult. All machines used to be built like this — levers and pulleys, that sort of thing.

“You have good eyesight,” Ignatz observes.

“Hm?”

He taps the rim of his glasses with his free hand.

“Your eyes,” Ignatz explains. “Don’t machinists usually wear magnifiers for this sort of thing?”

“Ah,” Khalid answers, testing his last solder point as he does. Then he sits back to admire his handiwork. Good eyesight. That’s one way to put it. “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

 _I’m lucky_ , he could tell him. It’s very nearly the truth. The one-hundred-percent truth is that he has a Crest, but that’s the sort of information that’s never served him well to be waved around, particularly not down here. Still, that’s the answer — the cherry at the top of Slithyre Industry’s catalogue of increasingly inhuman things, and first coronated with the creation of machines like Ignatz. They’d perfected the art of playing god in the birth of their steel society, but that’d just been a stepping stone to their true goal: the golden apple of immortality, meant to be dined upon by man alone. Not that it’s surprising. People have been chasing after it for...well, forever, right? Mankind has always imagined itself as a brilliant Daedalus, after all, as if they‘ve all forgotten how that old story ends. 

Crests have been the best version of _better_ that they’ve managed to date. Even he isn’t entirely certain of just what in the hell they are — loathe as he is to cut himself open to find out — but he knows that everyone who’s lucky enough to bear one happens to live a little longer than the rest of the flesh-and-bone monkeys stuck on this miserable rock they call home. And as one of the lucky ones, he knows firsthand that aside from hangovers and burned fingertips he’s never really been sick; that as a boy he’d always win footraces and take first place in feats of strength; and that he doesn’t need a pair of spectacles to see every tiny screw in Ignatz’s arm.

“Can you make a fist?”

Ignatz can. They both let out a sound of relief at the sight.

“How does it feel?”

“Great,” Ignatz peeps. Khalid smiles.

“A little slow, right?”

“A little slow,” Ignatz amends bashfully.

“You’ll get used to it,” Khalid laughs. He folds the gauze around Ignatz’s chip and stores it carefully away. Then he returns to help Ignatz close up his arm again, stepping back a pace afterwards to watch with an inspector’s eye as Ignatz gives his elbow a testing waggle.

“This is great, Khalid,” Ignatz insists once more. “How much do I owe you?”

Khalid laughs again, this time with the shake of his head and the wave of his hand.

“You don’t owe me anything. I’ve got plenty of solder.”

“Come on,” Ignatz doubles down. No doubt he was expecting this sort of resistance. Well, but then again, if there’s one thing that’s synonymous with Khalid it’s _resistance_ , right? “Maybe with the Alliance—”

“No,” Khalid interjects. He’s still smiling, but his voice doesn’t sound like it. Ignatz’s brow bunches tight.

“I’m a good shot, you know.”

Khalid knows he is. That’s what he was built for, after all. Even if Slithyre’s Department of Quality Assurance would be quick to tag him as _defective_ , he’s still twice the hawk-eye as any sharpshooter with a pulse— Khalid himself included.

“The sunflowers,” Khalid replies. Ignatz frowns, confused. “When you finish one. This place could use something cheery to hang up on the wall.” He gestures at one of them for good measure, scrubbed clean and bare and with a crack spiderwebbing through the plaster.

“The sunflowers,” Ignatz allows. He steps from the table, no doubt sensing that Khalid is getting ready to shoo him out the door. “But eventually... Raphael, too. We’ve talked about it. You can’t fight for all of us forever.”

“I can try,” Khalid answers with a shrug. Ignatz keeps frowning. It reminds him of Byleth. They’re not so good at being told _no_. He’d find it charming if it didn’t have such a dark undertone. What Khalid should tell him is that if he fights, too — him and Raphael, a gentle giant if he’s ever seen one, and sweet Marianne and silver-tongued Anna and all of the rest of them — then they might as well all lay down and die. What’s the point of him fighting at all if what he’s fighting for gets crushed along the way? But then again, what the fuck does he know, shoving Byleth right into the lion’s den while he coaches everyone else to be careful around cats’ claws? _Fuck_. So that’s the problem, too. He’s stuck in a maze down here, but it’s just a single fucking line drawn into a circle. 

“But if it comes to that,” Ignatz acquiesces. He pulls on his jacket and tugs at the zipper.

“If it comes to that,” Khalid sighs. “Be careful with the thoron, Ignatz.”

“You too,” Ignatz replies. He’s out the door before Khalid can wonder with just what it is he’s supposed to be careful.

* * *

“It’s been awhile since I last had the pleasure of your company,” Lorenz tuts. “And here I was thinking that we were such fond acquaintances. Some would call it rude, you know.”

“Would they?”

Byleth isn’t good at this sort of thing: _banter_ , Khalid calls it, but she knows with Lorenz it’s something far more convoluted than that. Dangerous, too, probably. No one does it in Dimitri’s inner circle, the atmosphere around him already too scalding for more hot air, but the rest of Faerghus can’t seem to manage a conversation without poetry and double entendres. It’s very much at home here in this quiet corner tucked away in the royal gardens, once host to a full fairytales’ worth of flowers now pared down to hardy summer roses and an endless array of topiaries that all seem to have the same round shape. It goes without saying that she’s feeling a little out of place — and that Lorenz looks like he was born here between the boughs instead of in the grime of everything down below.

“What would you prefer?” Lorenz asks, tipping a set of prettily-painted tins at her when he does. “Chamomile or black?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she answers tersely. He sighs — long, pained, his lashes fluttering closed as he tips his head slightly backwards at this newest affront.

“It most certainly matters,” he tells her, pinching a thumb of tea leaves and neatly tamping them into a little mesh basket that he then releases with some fanfare into the steaming teapot set between them. “We must allow ourselves some civility in times like these.”

“It’s just tea.”

“ _Just tea_ ,” he whispers between his teeth, spreading his fingers across his chest as if she’s just shot him through the heart. “And it is _just air_ that surrounds us, of course, and yet ask a man in a diving bell his opinion on the matter and you might find that he considers it rather divine.”

“One must see the beauty in everything,” she predicts flatly. Lorenz’s eyes flash with delight at her having finally humored him.

“Quite,” he purrs in agreement. “I knew you’d come along. You are the type, fond as you are of deer hunting. One must have an appreciation of nature for that sort of thing.”

She feels the infuriating itch at the back of her neck finally dissipate. So now he’s decided to play along. She’d been dreading that this would go on for hours.

“Was it a hunt that kept you away from the palace yesterday evening?”

“Yes,” she answers. Lorenz nods, pausing their conversation to primly pour two servings of fragrant tea for them to enjoy. Hers remains untouched while he gives his own an experimental sip. He tests it like a sommelier, eyes downcast, his brow slightly raised while he considers and then finally announces the tea’s acceptability with the near-imperceptible curl of his lips.

“Is it really the proper season?” he challenges, his eyes raising again to meet her own. “I understand that the prince was in want of your company at the time.”

“That isn’t what I’ve come here to discuss,” she insists. He takes another sip.

“I think it is still relevant, do you not? Hunting is sport, you know. One must not let oneself become too distracted with frivolity.”

Sometimes she doesn’t understand what Khalid sees in him.

“Lorenz,” she snaps. He sighs, brows arching again as if she’s just suggested something obscene.

“Our proud lion is best behaved when you’re in his cage with him. I’m not simply asking that you keep to yourself. There is more at stake than hurt feelings.”

“I understand.”

“Why, he made the most fearsome roar at a girl bringing him his dinner. Very nearly made her lose her head,” Lorenz sniffs. “I hope you understand that I mean that both figuratively and otherwise.”

Everything with Lorenz is both figurative and otherwise. They’ve been playing this game for nearly a year, after all; she knows him well enough to understand that much.

“No matter how impressive that rack of his, your stag needs to learn how to control his more base instincts,” Lorenz continues. “Even the simplest of creatures don’t live in rut for every day of the year.”

Byleth drums her fingers against their shared table’s neat mosaic inlay. Now Lorenz has traipsed from coquetry into insubordination. Unfortunately for her, he’s been given _carte-blanche_ to do this very thing. She has no idea what sort of feat he’d pulled in the past to have won Khalid’s favor so thoroughly, but whatever it was, it’d been nothing short of moving a mountain for him to be so comfortable in dragging the latter’s name through the mud now. Or maybe Khalid just finds it amusing. To be honest, she doesn’t fully understand what _amusing_ even means. 

“You owe him information,” she interjects. Lorenz takes another drink, still studying her as he does; gauging her for some reaction, maybe, or perhaps just desperate for a handhold in the smoothed out blandness of her response. Eventually he sighs, shoulders sinking slightly as he admits his defeat.

“I suppose I do,” he says. “So here’s a warning for him. There’s another hunter in the wood with an appetite for venison.” He leans closer to her from across the table. “Cornelia Arnim,” he whispers, the glitter of his prior teasing now long gone from his eyes.

“Arnim? The Slithyre executive?”

Byleth isn’t surprised to hear him invoke the shadowy conglomerate, but Cornelia Arnim wouldn’t be her first choice for their most villainous representative. She’s just a puppet — the _Head of Philanthropy_ , they call her, although all she really does is grease palms and deliver glorified kickbacks disguised as reparations for whatever most recent war crime her organization has brought to life.

“She puts your full menagerie at risk,” Lorenz agrees. “Let’s just say that she comes upon trophy hunting quite honestly. I’d suggest subtlety at first, but it may come to the point that you must have your lion eat her.”

“I’ll pass along the message.” 

“Hm,” says Lorenz. He finishes off the last dredges in his cup.

“Is that all?”

Byleth doesn’t bother to wait for his answer; stands instead, eager to escape the garden’s perfume. Lorenz very nearly lets her before he snatches sideways to grab her by the sleeve when she passes him by. She lets him drag her down towards him, although it’ll be the last time.

“Don’t be a fool,” he tells her, so quiet that he might as well not speak at all. His voice has finally been stripped of all of its finery. She can hear the plain earthenware of the Lower Districts on his tongue. “None of this will matter if Dimitri finds you out. He’ll have you hanging by your neck in an afternoon, and with Khalid beside you. One more betrayal — that’s all that stands between us and him burning this whole damned world down. I won’t just stand idly by while you make a game out of it.”

Byleth pulls herself from his grip. He slips backwards into his seat again, smoothing the crinkled fingers of his glove while he does.

“I understand the stakes,” she reassures him tightly.

“So do I,” he agrees. His voice has risen to its regular register again. “But just so we are clear with one another... Let us say that I have taken to hunting, too, and find myself with a rifle and only one bullet to my name. Presented with a doe and a stag, my dear advisor, let me assure you that my shot will _always_ be the doe.”

* * *

Dimitri bathes before dinner. He sheds his unwashed rags as well, replacing them with a pair of gunmetal slacks and a crisply ironed linen shirt in robin’s egg blue opened to the third button of the collar. He hasn’t yet submitted to the endless requests of his staff to wear a false eye, but he’s covered the empty socket with a patch, at least. It helps. The young valet charged with pouring his wine doesn’t even flinch when he bows beside him to fill his glass. Dimitri does, but no one’s looking for it, too busy holding their breath as they all watch him pick up his fork. He does so with all of the understated etiquette demanded by his station. The dining room exhales in unison. The night is saved. Order has been restored. They dip their heads in thanks and begin to cut slivers from the quartered pheasants on their plates. 

Byleth slices the stewed carrot of her dinner into smaller versions of itself. She’d managed to convince them all that she was a vegetarian ten months earlier. It’d seemed the best option to reduce waste. They’re in a war, after all, and although she can eat she doesn’t need the calories to keep running. Why swallow up Faerghus’ last generation of fish and fowl? Two months later Felix had told the chef that she’d recruited him into her cause. The poor man had nearly lost his wits, then, convinced as he’d been that it was some coordinated attack on his cooking. It’d taken a long time to talk him down from his own resignation, and Felix a wet cat for every moment of it, loathe as he was to do something as absurd as _empathize_.

So this is how they eat — all of them, Dimitri’s so-called generals or, more plainly, what’s left of his retinue of childhood friends and allies who haven’t yet been cast out during one of his paranoid bouts. There’s Sylvain and Felix, of course, and Byleth, as well as Lorenz, who has ingratiated himself as the master of Dimitri’s finances alongside the management of his household, and Ingrid, the fresh-faced head of his royal guard. Byleth supposes it’s not so grand a court, all said and told, but Dimitri is not so easy a master, so perhaps it’s what he deserves.

They all carefully dance around the pitfalls of the war currently tearing Faerghus apart, commenting on the food and the weather and the wine while they take turns in gauging Dimitri’s mood. The prince joins in with well-trained pleasantries, the words he speaks no doubt as tasteless on his tongue as the pheasant growing cold on his plate. Ultimately the night will be judged a success, if only because it doesn’t end with that same plate being dashed on the floor.

Next they eat a dessert of clotted cream and blueberries and stage a mild debate about what sort of fruit would be featured best in a pie — strawberries, Sylvain insists; _of course you’d say that_ , Ingrid snarks — before finishing off the meal with a toast to Dimitri’s health shared over short glasses of port. Then they all depart, each anxious to dart from the dining room before the clock strikes that magic hour that turns Dimitri back into a monster again, leaving only him and Byleth behind. He waits until Ingrid shuts the door behind her before he sinks back into his chair and sighs. All of them have become accustomed to holding their breath, she’s long ago learned; even he isn’t immune.

“Earlier,” he says to her finally, his head tipped backwards against the back of his chair, the fingers of his left hand splayed across his brow. “This morning. I’d like to apologize for my outburst.”

“That isn’t necessary,” she replies. A sad smile spills across his lips.

“Of course it is. You were right. I didn’t sleep. I know it’s worse when I go without it, and yet I toss myself into it all the same.”

He drags his hand downwards, his palm slipping along the bridge of his nose before pausing at his chin.

“I should not require a nursemaid,” he adds into the fan of his fingers. “Surely I am of an age that can put myself to bed.”

“You were troubled.”

He hums and nods, his eye still focused on the glitter of the chandelier strung above them.

“Troubled,” he echoes. “I suspect we are all troubled, aren’t we?” He looks at her finally, his eye as blue as it is earnest. “I see it in you as well. The weight of something heavy. And I fear that this weight is _me_ , my teacher, and that I am unable to lift it from your shoulders. How desperate I am to try, and yet...” He pulls back his hand, glancing away from her to watch the spin of a ring around his finger as he pushes against it with his thumb. The signet, a horny-beaked griffon, bobs like a buoy between his knuckles. “And yet I know that if you were to share your burden with me, that perhaps this beast inside me would betray you all the same.”

“I trust you,” she insists.

“How?” His question might be a challenge, but his voice is only rueful. “How can you trust a man who cannot even trust himself?”

“I know you.”

“You do,” he agrees, sighing again. “Out of anyone you know me best, and most of all my ugliest parts.” His words hang heavy in the air.

“You shouldn’t carry it all alone,” she offers a moment later. “My burdens are yours, and yours mine. But even with us together they may be too much to bear. If we were to find an ally—”

“Not tonight,” Dimitri interjects, waving a weary hand at her. “No more politics — none of Edelgard’s liberation nor the benevolence of revolutionaries. I may never be coronated, but perhaps you will allow me this single act of sovereignty.”

“Of course,” she answers carefully. He offers her another withering smile.

“I’d like to read,” he admits. “Would you sit with me? In the library? Just for an hour.”

“Of course I will,” she says again. He winces slightly at the words.

“Not because it is an order,” he clarifies. “But because I’ve already asked that they stoke the fire there, and that it will be warm, and quiet, and won’t have the stink of gasoline like everything else around here. If you would prefer to find your fancy elsewhere I won’t mind.”

That last part is a lie. They both know it well enough.

“Of course,” she says again, and this time with enough conviction that he stands to lead her there. She follows him through a set of sleepy halls, each empty from the staff that has learned to run from their employer’s long-stride steps, and into the understated splendor of the palace’s library. It must be one of the last places in the world that still plays host to books — real, tangible things filled with fragrant pages stamped with the scent of dust and ink and forgotten ages. Dimitri picks one from their vast number and her another. They settle into a matching set of leather chairs and begin to leaf through their selections. The tall rafters of the room fill with the crackle of the fire and the quiet whisper of the pages and nothing more.

At some point Byleth looks over and sees that Dimitri has fallen asleep. His book is left abandoned in his lap, his fingers still spread over an unread page while his head bobs dreamily against his shoulder. Byleth sets her own book aside and approaches him, pulling a neat-folded blanket from a bench as she does and unfurling the wool of it in time with her step as she comes to his side. First she plucks the volume from his hands, flipping the red ribbon from its spine into place to keep his page. Next she tucks the blanket around his shoulders, smoothing it gently around him. He shifts slightly at her touch, his head nodding backwards to rest against the swell of the headrest.

She brushes back the messy shag of his hair with an absentminded sweep of her hand. He only looks his age when he’s asleep like this. That’s when she remembers just how young he is — his skin still smooth and youthful except for the ruin of his right eye, and itself easy to forget behind the benign fabric of its patch. In a different life perhaps he would have deserved a storybook of his own. A brave springtime king, blond and handsome, and as strong as he was kind; the shield of his people and the sword to protect them, each and every one.

And maybe it isn’t his fault that he isn’t, but instead simply a curse because of where he was born. Her own father had been born here, too, so perhaps even she isn’t immune. Faerghus. Civilization’s last satellite caught between the ruin of the earth and the glitter of the stars. _The Kingdom of Man_ , Khalid had taught her. _The Griffon’s Keep_ , Ingrid sometimes said. Maybe only Dimitri knew its true name; had been so close to writing it out for them when he’d taken his father’s pen from his desk and carved out the soft white flesh of his eye.

* * *

Day two and his head’s still killing him. Khalid’s starting to think that he might be cursed. It might as well be that, the way his luck is going. He tries not to think about it too closely. Won’t do anybody any good for him to just sulk around. Instead he helps restring a line of streetlights outside and gets the grocer’s car running again and breaks up a fight between dumb drunkards brawling below his bedroom window before they make his life even more complicated. He’s just found a moment of respite in the form of a hot lunch when another goddamned knock comes rapping at his door.

“Not now,” he sighs. It’s quiet enough that they probably can’t hear him.

“Hey, Boss!” comes Leonie’s brassy retort from outside. _Shit_. Leonie always means trouble, and even in spite of her best intentions. Her and the rest of her Breakers serve as an impromptu neighborhood guard, given that Leicester’s never had the money nor the bureaucracy to have a proper police force, and that’s mostly good news for him; nobody sticks their nose into his business, and he’s mended enough of the Breakers’ shit (and some of the Breakers themselves) to keep himself and the rest of the Alliance in their good graces besides. But he’s certainly not in the mood to play good-cop bad-cop with her now, and so instead he just glumly shoves at his bowl of bacon and lentils and counts to ten, hoping that _ten_ means _goodbye_.

“Hello! _Hell-llo_?”

It doesn’t. He gives it another ten for good luck before he gives up and slumps miserably to the door.

“Leonie,” he greets her with a smile that under no circumstances makes its way to his eyes. “How nice to see you.”

“Yowza,” she barks back with a far more honest grin, “you look like shit, buddy.”

“Very kind. Can I help you?”

His question serves as a bookmark for a far more important question, namely _who in the fuck is that?_ The _who_ stares back at him from beneath the cowl of a long, dusty cloak that advertises quite plainly that whoever they are isn’t good news. It doesn’t help that Leonie’s mysterious guest is perhaps the tallest man Khalid has ever seen, and most likely the broadest shouldered besides.

“Well, I dunno about _that,_ given the state of those bags around your eyes, but I think that _I’m_ about to help _you_!”

Khalid raises a brow at that. Leonie simply laughs and claps his shoulder hard enough to make his teeth chatter before nudging her way inside. Khalid lets her, if only because he’s smart enough to know that her mute behemoth will probably make it past the door despite how insistent he is that they keep their dirty boots off of his floors.

“Is that so,” he deadpans.

“I’d like to introduce you to my new friend,” Leonie continues seamlessly, snatching up a nearby wretch to fiddle with as she does. She’s always like this. He doesn’t know where she gets the energy. It’s better than thoron, whatever it is. “Just met him over at the _Pegasus and Wyvern_. You can imagine what kind of ruckus he caused there.”

In accordance with a surprising sense of etiquette, the giant has paused to remove both his shoes and the hood of his cloak as well. Khalid glances over at him again just in time to catch him nod with a respectful, if unspoken, hello. He’s got a head of silver hair that explains quite neatly just why those drunk old bigots at the _Pegasus and Wyvern_ hadn’t taken very kindly to sharing a drink.

“I thought he could use a change of scenery. Asked him what he was doing down here around these pretty parts and wouldn’t you know it, turns out you and him seem to have a _mutual interest_.”

“Is that so,” Khalid says again, his voice still drawling with disbelief.

“Says he’s looking to _go up_ ,” she answers, shooting her thumb up towards the ceiling with the words. “I reckoned you were the best in the business of stargazing, huh?”

“Sure,” Khalid answers. “Thanks, Leonie.” Now he needs to shut her up. This isn’t a topic that he can let her bull-rush like everything else.

“Oh no,” she predicts, flipping the wrench onto the mess of his unmade bed so that she can brace both of her fists at her hips. “I’ve got a good nose, you know. I think I’ve sniffed up something big for you. Consider me a piggy with a truffle. Don’t you think I’ll go off with just a _thank-you-very-much_.”

“What the hell am I going to give you?”

“Well, now, that’s for me to find out, isn’t it?” She winks. “Listen. I’m lenient. I’ll give you some time to collect. Just remember that you owe me. Big time, buddy. Got it?”

“Got it,” Khalid groans, dragging his fingers through his hair with his reply. He swears he can feel his headache pounding through his palm.

“Fan- _tas_ -tic,” she replies. “I’ll leave you two to it, then. Saving the world, or whatever it is you do. Is that right? Well, until then — places to go, people to see, you know how it is.”

She waggles her fingers at both of them, darting backwards with a quick step towards the door. Maybe she’s some sort of vampire. It’s like she’s sucking the last of his breath from him as she goes.

“Goodbye, Leonie.”

“See ya later, boss man!”

The door clatters shut. Khalid feels like he’s just drowned himself in another bottle of gin. The behemoth waits politely for him to speak.

“Sorry,” Khalid says. He needs the time to figure out just what goddamned name he’s going to give him. “She’s always like that.”

“I am not familiar with this area,” the giant admits in a baritone voice. “I was lucky to have met her before I went where I was unwanted.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a good way to put it for anywhere and most anyone, huh?”

The giant doesn’t say anything at that, but there’s something knowing in his sea-glass eyes that makes Khalid feel something kindred between them. Well, fuck it, anyways. If he’s been sent to kill him at least he had the decency to take off his shoes first.

“I’m Khalid,” he offers along with the forward jut of his hand. The man nods and swallows up his fingers with his handshake.

“I am Dedue. It is a pleasure to meet you.” 


	3. Peppermint and Ginger

“Well, dinner was a resounding success, don’t you think?”

Felix doesn’t answer, although it’s not like Sylvain was really under the impression that he would. They both slip silent through the door of the latter’s quarters. The smooth, mechanical _shink_ it makes as it slots into its pocket and then slides forward again to cut them off from the rest of the palace is strangely soothing. As a boy, Sylvain had often gone with his mother to a little bakery on the high street called the _Belle Madame_. It’d had a set of bells next to the door that chimed when you went inside. Maybe it’s something like that. It’s a nice memory, in any case; one of the few from his childhood that’s made from sugar instead of bruises and broken arms.

Sylvain stretches and yawns and surveys his domain. The room is altogether spartan, like most other places inside the palace now stripped of all of its finery thanks to Dimitri’s capricious fancies and, more recently, the war. There’s a desk and its matching chair draped with an abandoned jacket, a low bench that he only uses when he’s lacing up his boots. The more interesting things include the rug, an obnoxiously ostentatious reproduction of an even more outlandish antique, all reds and oranges and spots of green scattered into spiraling flowers and repeating arabesques. Sylvain steps out of his dress shoes and plods over it in his socks. The dense weave pillows beneath his toes. It feels good.

He likes things that feel good. It’s not like it’s some kind of oddity. Everybody does, don’t they? Just that some people are less willing to admit it. He’s never really bothered with being coy. His quarters say that much for him. His bed, too, is piled high with billion thread-count sheets and too many pillows. A fluffy duvet finishes it off on top like a dollop of whipped cream. It’s unmade, of course, because someone who chases pleasure isn’t by definition _neat_ , but like always it calls his name as soon as he steps through the door.

Felix ignores the bed’s siren song and sits on the bench instead. The lesser observer would think that he’s looking a little glum, but that’s just Felix. When he isn’t scowling he’s doing some other version of it, and Sylvain has learned that it doesn’t really have much to do with his moods. Anyway, he looks good, too; his hair fresh-washed and shiny and nearly liquid against his dress uniform’s harsh lines. Sylvain always looks a little overpolished in the outfit, but on Felix it looks like it’s been special-made just for him.

Whatever. Felix looks good in everything. The thought makes a wave of heat settle in Sylvain’s chest. Maybe that’s the port from dinner, too. He decides to chase after it.

“Nightcap?”

“Hm,” Felix replies. Sylvain’s already turned to hunt out a bottle of something from his desk. _Hm_ means lots of things when it comes from Felix’s mouth. Sylvain has learned how to interpret all of them. This time it means _you know I don’t_ , which also really means _you know I don’t have a stomach and that my tongue’s just there for show_ as well as _even if I did, I know what men like you do when they get somebody drunk._

Sylvain thinks that last one is a little unfair.

“I thought that Dimitri looked pretty good tonight,” Sylvain then says, deciding that his older train of thought will tease Felix more easily into conversation than this newer one. As he says the words he selects a bottle of whisky from his collection, still tinkling from being pulled open in a drawer that’s supposed to play host to far more utilitarian things, and a rocks glass. “All there, you know?”

“He’s getting worse,” Felix answers icily. Sylvain frowns and focuses on pouring a finger of whisky into his glass; adds another for good measure, and half another more. _Yeah, well_. “As soon as he realized that Byleth wasn’t in the palace he was ready to call in a firing squad.”

Sylvain takes a drink and eases open the zipper splitting the center of his collar apart. He pauses and then continues along its track, shrugging off the heavy thing in its entirety to strip himself down to the black weave of his undershirt.

“That music at the border didn’t help,” Sylvain supplies with a shrug.

“It was just noise,” Felix counters. “It could have been violence.” _What will Dimitri do then_ , he leaves unspoken, although they both know the answer: _charred earth_. They’ve seen it before. Hell, they’ve lit the fire, most times. Sylvain sighs and swallows down the rest of his drink. It’s too much for one measured mouthful, but he likes the way it burns. He turns and fills it up again before he kicks the desk chair sideways and plops down with another heavy breath.

“Where do you think she goes?”

Felix frowns at Sylvain’s question. Sylvain understands why. They’re in a bit of a predicament with Byleth. It doesn’t take a brilliant man to want to question why she’s there. After all, what kind of person would willingly throw themselves into Dimitri’s orbit? He and Felix have been sucked into it since forever, but Byleth had spun off years ago like a lucky comet. But then she’d come back and of course Dimitri had swept her up again, and this time so close to the center of his dark singularity that they’ve become binary, but that doesn’t mean that she’s not dangerous. It probably means the opposite.

“The moon?” Sylvain answers himself glibly. Felix scoffs.

“It would be better if she did,” he replies. Sylvain nods, surprised at Felix’s willingness to play along.

“She’ll get _someone_ in trouble,” Sylvain agrees. “Her, us, him. I don’t know.” He takes another generous drink. The whisky is working its magic. Dimitri doesn’t seem like such a poltergeist anymore. He doesn’t even really care about Byleth, to be honest; is just thinking about the pleasant weightlessness of his thighs and how his thoughts have started to whisk and slur inside his skull. He leans back against the desk chair, his legs cocked wide in a way that’s usually trained out of him. Fuck, but it feels good to stop playing soldier once in a while.

“We should follow her,” Felix suggests.

“Nah,” Sylvain says into his drink. The thick glass muffles his voice and spits it back at him in a puff of ethylene that makes him realize too late that he’s already drunk. “Feels like a panty raid, you know? We’re free people. Isn’t that the point? Anybody’s allowed to have a few hours to themselves.”

“Not if they’re using them to build a coup.”

“Who’s to say?” Sylvain polishes off his second pour and squints at the glass, turning it between his fingers before he sets it aside. “If she can topple us in her spare time then maybe we deserve it.”

“It doesn’t matter what we deserve,” Felix counters. It punches the wind from Sylvain’s lungs. He sucks it back in with a dry laugh, shaking his head as he does. _No_ , he thinks, _it doesn’t really matter_. Hasn’t ever really mattered, honestly.

“Let’s talk about something else,” Sylvain offers, and if only to avoid agreeing with him. “And take off your jacket, won’t you? You’re making me feel like I’m naked at the front of the class.”

Felix glowers at him. It doesn’t change the way he dutifully pulls at his zipper, although he folds his jacket neatly in half and drapes it along the bench instead of letting it sit to gather wrinkles on the floor like Sylvain’s. He looks more comfortable afterwards, but they both know those weren’t the terms of Sylvain’s suggestion. Sylvain doesn’t bother to hide his roving eyes. Felix looks good in a uniform. He looks better out of it. The whisky agrees, gathering in a molten pool low in his belly.

Sylvain catches himself a little too late on that one. He tries to redeem himself by spitting out “what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”

Felix must know that he doesn’t care about the answer, not the way that his eyes have already dipped to the perfect triangle between Felix’s shoulders and his belt, but among many other things Felix is also his keeper. Sylvain has never been one for timetables. That sort of thing makes a man look sloppy in different circles, but in theirs it could get him killed if he’s not careful. Good thing Felix was built to be careful.

“Drills,” he tells him, not bothering to supply the starting hour; they both know if Felix doesn’t wake him he won’t go. “Another sortie to the south.”

“Huh,” Sylvain answers. “Loud or quiet?”

Felix cocks one of his brows. It looks so fucking good — that tart little aristocratic sneer of his, as if any part of him has ever been _aristocratic_. Sylvain fights the urge to lurch forward and trace the crook of the dark, perfect arch with his tongue. Shit. The whisky’s really got to him.

“Reconnaissance only,” Felix dryly supplies. “Lucky for you. You’re drinking for a rough morning.”

“I’ll take something,” Sylvain counters. There’s a blister pack of chalky pastilles already waiting for him on his desk. Half of the windows are punched out. Every soldier gets them — _up-and-at-ems_ , they call them. One of Faerghus’ many pragmatic innovations. They all know to expect an incursion at any time. It’s not like the Empire waits patiently for them to finish their dinner before it starts knocking on the walls. It only takes one pill chewed between the last set of a soldier’s molars to dry out every ounce of alcohol in his veins — and anything else that’s not adrenaline, including other inconvenient cocktails like fear and second guessing. They’re fantastic for hangovers, too, but the whole point is that they sober you, and Sylvain isn’t really in the mood for _that_ just yet. It feels nice to swim in warm water when you’re freezing all of the time.

“You looked nice at dinner,” Sylvain continues, his voice cloying into a purr, “nibbling on those radishes.”

Felix’s lips pucker in exactly the way he was hoping.

“Shut up,” he says.

 _Where does it go_ , Sylvain had asked him once, stars in his eyes as he watched Felix soldier through a plate of brisket and cabbage. _It burns_ , Felix had answered cryptically, gesturing at his chest before he stabbed his fork through another unwelcome mouthful. For some reason out of everything, the idea of Felix’s digestion still baffles him the most. It’s so wasteful, superfluous, and yet at the same time so perfectly functional in its design — no unpleasant leftovers, just the clean and absolute evaporation of _something_ into _nothing_. That’s supposed to be impossible, isn’t it?

He’s still staring. Felix wises up to it. He stands from the bench and crosses that ugly rug to plant himself between the gangly spread of Sylvain’s legs. He has his hands on his hips like a disappointed nanny. It makes Sylvain’s mouth water.

“You’re always looking at me,” Felix says to him. Other people would ask _why are you looking_ or maybe even _are you_ , but he always cuts right to the bone. “Stop it. You need to be more aware of your surroundings.”

“At _dinner_?”

Sylvain asks the question with a lazy smile, but its more for show than anything. They both know that a dinner table with Dimitri at the head is just as dangerous as a battlefield.

“Sylvain,” Felix chides him.

“I couldn’t help it. You look so good when it’s a little dark. They used to make movies about people like you, you know — pretty and brooding.”

Felix rolls his eyes. Sylvain reaches forward to hook a finger under his belt. _People like you_. The words echo in his head as Felix submits to being tugged slightly forward. Sylvain flattens his hand against his hip, smoothing it over the fine fabric of his trousers before he sneaks his fingers under his undershirt. His skin is smooth, warm. _People like you_. Sylvain’s eyes slip half-closed.

Most military grade machines are cold to the touch. This is the sort of information that Sylvain can share as an objective fact. He’s killed plenty of them. They feel like walking cadavers. Felix feels alive. He isn’t special— he’s just different. An espionage unit, Sylvain had learned when his curiosity had finally gotten the better of him. Not special, just more expensive. It’s easy enough to find a mole if there’s nothing human about them, after all — if they don’t have a pulse, if their fingers feel like the outside of a winter windowpane. Felix’s makers had predicted all of that and given each its own solution: hair that grows from spools tucked under his scalp, and eyelashes, too; blue-painted veins; moles. Not the spies. The freckles.

There’s one next to his navel. _Navel_ , that’s another thing that came preloaded with a Slithyre price tag. Not like he was ever a babe in his mama’s belly, right? Sylvain slips his hands to shift up Felix’s shirt; finds it, the beautiful little chestnut dot, ever so slightly raised next to that artificial divot. Presses his lips against it. A prickle of gooseflesh spreads across Felix’s stomach. It’s fascinating. Sylvain knows that it’s just an algorithm, but does that really matter when the end effect is the same?

He must have cost a fortune. Espionage units aren’t meant for open combat. Felix’s talent on the field comes from an extra set of modules which surely qualify as _aftermarket_. Sylvain imagines them as little cartridges, although he knows that they’re just more ones and zeroes; still, it’s easier to picture them that way. _Aggression_ , one would be labeled, the biggest of the lot; _agility. Endurance_.

Sylvain nods forward to catch a strip of Felix’s skin between his teeth. It’s soft and yielding. He leaves a set of little red crescent moons behind when he pulls back. The only thing that’s off is that Felix doesn’t hiss or grumble when he does it in the way he’d imagine a flesh-and-bone Felix would. God. He wishes he would. He wishes...

“Sorry,” he mutters suddenly, as if he’s just woken from sleepwalking. That whisky really went to his head. He releases Felix’s shirt to crumple back down to his belt and stares up at him in contrition. Felix looks back at him with a measured stare before he finally moves to card a hand through Sylvain’s hair. “Sorry, Fe.”

Felix crouches between his knees so that they’re eye-to-eye. Sylvain counts his lashes; the flecks of gold swirling around his irises. One of his eyelids is shaped ever so slightly different from the other. The asymmetry makes him all the more convincing. Sometimes Sylvain feels like Narcissus staring at him. The comparison probably isn’t entirely accurate, but the spirit’s in the right place. He could look at him forever, crouched over his pool eternal, that sort of thing.

His lips chap, too. Isn’t that brilliant? Sylvain can’t help but let his gaze drop to them — to the little crack that’s formed in the cleft of the lower one. It’s always in the same place, but nobody makes a game out of looking at him other than Sylvain, so that’s not really a problem. _Sorry_ , he’d said, and so he shouldn’t kiss him; but he does, of course. He’s just as predictable as that pre-programmed slash of raw skin.

Here’s where the illusion starts to end. Felix never tastes like anything — not his dinners, nor bad breath, not even the mint of his toothpaste. But Dimitri won’t kiss him to test if he’s human —or at least Sylvain doesn’t think he will — so maybe that’s alright. It doesn’t make this any less pleasant, although it’d been unsettling at first, back when Felix didn’t know what kissing was and didn’t know what to do with his tongue. He knows now. It’s because of Sylvain. Because he’s an asshole, probably; because of who he is in his most innermost parts. Soft sheets and stupid rugs.

“Sorry,” he mutters again, breathless, his lips in a perpendicular wedge to Felix’s own.

“Stop saying that,” Felix says.

Sylvain wants to believe him. It’s enough to make his skin itch under his clothes. He gets a little dizzy and then he’s kissing him again, hunched forward now with his arms tangled around his shoulders. It’s just that Felix is so _warm_ ; that he steals his razor sometimes to shave and leaves little black hairs behind; that he’s the only thing in this entire fucked up world that’s good.

“Felix,” he groans, feeling fingers on the button of his slacks. “You don’t have to—”

“Shut up,” Felix bites back. Sylvain’s mind spins at that in the way that a different man would swoon at a long-awaited love confession. He moans again when Felix pulls him already stiff from his briefs and gives him a cursory stroke before he leans forward to take him in his mouth.

“Ah, shit,” he gasps, which isn’t very romantic. Felix doesn’t seem to mind. He settles into his knees instead, his palms flat against Sylvain’s inner thighs as he finds a better angle.“Fe. So good, I—”

 _I wish, I wish, I wish_. Wished that Felix’s cheeks grew ruddy like Sylvain’s did in times like these; that he panted, that he groaned, that he slurred his name and missed a syllable when he did. Wished that he liked it. Wished that Sylvain could be convinced that he liked anything at all. He told himself, night after night like a prayer, that you didn’t need a heart to feel; that when he looked into Felix’s goldspun eyes and told him that he loved him, that Felix knew what it meant when he said it back. But the fact is that everything has a limit, and everything has a trade-off. They’ve given machines like Felix fingernails and hot, wet mouths, but in the end he’s still just a doll special-made for Fodlan’s fucked up puppet show.

Sylvain isn’t stupid. He knows what sort of life he’s lived: mistakes, missteps, bad things born from good intentions. Everything he’s done has always been balanced out by the punishment he’s due. This one’s poetic, at least; for him to have burned through so many suitors only to finally find himself irreparably bound to someone who’d been made to be sexless, and in the most neutered sense of the word. When he’s really desperate he teaches Felix how to feign, despite the sinking feeling it gives him— how to thread their fingers together when they’re alone in a room, how to slot themselves when they sleep back-to-chest, how to suck him off — just like Rodrigue had once taught him how to swallow his wasted meals.

“Felix, _Felix_ ,” he gasps brokenly when he cums. Felix hovers patiently between his knees. _Fuck_ , Sylvain thinks, pawing at the hair that’s spilled around Felix’s face while he watches the sharp shadow cast below the ridge of his Adam’s apple bob under the fluorescence of the overhead lights. _Beautiful_ , offers another voice in his head; _fucked up_ , charges a third. _Yeah_ , Sylvain agrees, slumping forward to press his sweaty forehead against Felix’s unflustered one. _Yeah, it’s fucked up_ ; fucked up that he uses him like this, fucked up that they serve so obediently despite the certainty that they’re both dead if they’re found out; fucked up that Rodrigue coded his clockwork son to be cruel without bothering to teach him how to hold hands. Sylvain kisses one of those pretty dark eyebrows and then the bridge of Felix’s nose, the divot of his philtrum, the wet pink of his lips. His mouth already tastes ionic again.

“Love you,” Sylvain slurs, and it’s the truth. The way that Felix squirms under the positive attention looks real, too.

“You’re drunk,” he tells him, carefully untangling himself from Sylvain’s crooked arms to stand and strip off his undershirt in the same smooth motion. “Come on. Let’s go to bed.”

Sylvain doesn’t answer him immediately. He watches him undress instead. Felix crosses his arms once he’s down to his briefs and scowls at him. It makes Sylvain’s breath catch in his throat.

“ _Sylvain_.”

“Okay, okay,” he mumbles, lurching forward. He totters from heel to heel as he steps out of his unbuttoned slacks and works backwards to slip off his shirt.

“Your socks,” Felix observes when he tumbles into the bed.

“Mnm,” Sylvain replies. He’s not thinking about socks; has remembered those pastilles instead, and far too late. Whatever. The mattress is soft and his body has already started to warm the sheets. He can manage a hangover. Probably deserves it. He hears Felix make an exasperated sound as he pads forward to yank off the offending articles of clothing himself.

“Felix,” Sylvain protests, but Felix has already stomped sideways to switch off the lights. He probably folds the stupid socks, too, but eventually he slips into the bed. Sylvain slings his arms around his waist and rocks him backwards until he’s sprawled atop him. Shit, but he’s heavy, isn’t he?

“Love you,” he repeats again. This time it sounds less desperate. Whisky has a way of taking the clay of his guilt and molding it into simple affection once his drunkenness has had enough time to steep. Felix grumbles but doesn’t fight it when Sylvain juts his knees between his legs and shoves his nose against the corner of his jaw.“Love you, Fe.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Sure,” Sylvain yawns. He’s eager enough to obey him. First he spreads a hand over Felix’s chest, finding a simple pleasure in the rat-a-tat of his false heartbeat against his palm. _Fucked up_ , that mean little voice reminds him even as his eyes flutter closed. Sure. Sure it is. But maybe there’s something good in it, too; and not just for him but for Felix. Revenge, he thinks, his breath slowing into slumber. _It burns_ , Felix had said. Sylvain thinks about his own spent seed burning to nothing inside of Felix and wonders, as he drifts off, if all omens are bad.

* * *

Sylvain looks tired even when he’s sleeping. It’s been like this for a while. Felix hates it. The worst part is that he knows what put those dark, bruised shadows under his eyes, but he doesn’t know how to fix them. He can’t make Dimitri better and he can’t kill the prince, either, and even if he did there’d be no one else to take his place. 

They could run, but where? Every inch of Fodlan is strapped onto a collision course. The only place that’s left is the empty ruin of the world outside it, and if they meant to point their escape in that direction it would be far more efficient to simply tie a pair of nooses to the rafters in Sylvain’s room instead.

“Nmft,” Sylvain says in his sleep. He smacks his lips and buries himself deeper into the fan of Felix’s hair. His hands, once loose and drowsy, tighten to grip Felix’s shoulder and the round of one of his hips. Felix frowns and snakes an arm free to brush back the firecracker shag spilled over Sylvain’s brow. His eyelashes are the same cinnabar shade. Dimitri has pale hair, too, but his lashes are dark like Felix’s, and made even darker by the wild blue of his eye. Felix wonders what makes it like that — which spool of molecular stuff inside Sylvain had dictated that he’d have honey eyes and a crooked smile instead of Dimitri’s madness. He’s thankful for it, whatever it is; whatever blessed, precious thing that’d fired at just the right time of his conception to make him _Sylvain_.

 _Keep your distance_ , Rodrigue had ordered him at the beginning of everything. Sylvain had been too close to Glenn before he’d died to admit that he’d simply misremembered a second son. Four weeks later Felix had said something wrong in a conversation with Ingrid and Sylvain had saved him, distracting her from Felix’s deadly mistake made while recounting some Fraldarius legend by harping on and on about a recent ridiculous misdeed of his own. Afterwards Sylvain had slung his arm around his shoulders when they’d found themselves alone and had suggested without any venom that perhaps it would be helpful if they covered some of the basics before Felix made his next storytelling attempt.

He still doesn’t understand why Sylvain did it, or why he’s done most anything since. He’s unpredictable, to say the least, and maybe to the point of being irrational. There’s something so beautifully _human_ about it that it sometimes still strikes Felix dumb.

Sylvain’s brow furrows against a dark twist in his dreaming. Felix leans forward to smooth it flat again with his lips. His skin is nearly too-hot there, made flush by his drinking and by how closely they’ve tangled themselves together. Even without the whisky, this is how it always is. Sylvain hates to sleep alone.

“Love you,” Felix whispers, and somehow he feels it, too.

* * *

Khalid should offer his new guest a cup of tea. It’s not like he’s unfamiliar with proper etiquette. The problem is that no true master of good manners has ever stepped foot in a place like Leicester. Even after it’s been filtered and boiled, for instance, their water still tastes sour. The bouquet is worse: chlorine, sulfur, tar. The finest leaves grown in Adrestia’s gardens wouldn’t be able to stand a brew like that.

Coffee beans are better, rancid as they are, and so coffee it is. He tips a generous pour into his grinder and lets the roaring whir of its moving parts grant both him and Dedue a moment to collect their thoughts. Since Leonie left them alone Dedue has lingered in his spot near the door, his hands still folded neatly in front of his belt as he casts a nonjudgmental eye over the worktable at the room’s center and the rings of increasingly chaotic mess surrounding it. He’s dressed simply: a navy shirt and grey-black trousers and a pair of boots that look like they’re familiar with being shined. His cloak is the worse for wear, but that doesn’t surprise Khalid. It’s been raining lately. That stuff eats through nearly everything and bleaches what’s left behind. He’s burned through a whole wardrobe of jackets himself, and that says nothing about the state of the roof.

“I would offer you something to eat,” Khalid says, turning with two mugs of steaming coffee for them both as he nods at an old claw-footed table and a mismatched set of chairs, “but you’ve caught me right before my grocery run.”

“Please, do not inconvenience yourself on my account,” Dedue offers quickly. He accepts one of the mugs with a _thank you very much_ and takes a seat at the table. Khalid is suddenly thankful for his headache, certain as he is that the sight of the man folded like a bear on a dollhouse stool would’ve otherwise made him grin. That isn’t good etiquette, either. “I am the one who has interrupted your morning. You are very generous to have allowed me an audience.”

 _Huh_. Can’t say he’s heard that one before. Khalid nods and blows a cooling breath over his mug, still eyeing the man as he does.

“Have you been in Leicester long?”

“No,” Dedue answers. If he finds Khalid’s curious stare unsettling he’s doing a good job of hiding it. “I have been here for four days, including today.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Morfis.”

Khalid takes a testing sip of his coffee. It still tastes like shit.

“You don’t strike me as a Morfis man.”

Dedue hums; takes a sip himself.

“No,” he agrees.

“How have you liked it? Leicester?”

“It is a spirited place,” Dedue replies. This time Khalid does grin.

“That’s diplomatic. I’m not going to ask if anyone’s given you any trouble, because I know the answer’s _yes_ , even if I get the feeling that you wouldn’t say so,” Khalid says. Dedue raises his brows slightly at that. “Is that why you’re here? Haven’t racked up a debt, have you? I’m not much of a moneylender.”

“That is not why I have come,” Dedue agrees with the slow shake of his head.

“Looking for a room, then? I’m afraid this’s all I have to offer,” Khalid retorts with a wave of his arm across the clutter of everything — the neat-packed shelves and the scattered boots and crinkled papers making a mess of the floors and the sad state of his little bed. “It’s not really built for double tenancy.”

“I have been told that you are a generous man,” Dedue says, which isn’t really much of an answer. He takes a sip from his mug before he continues. Somehow his massive grip transforms the ugly thing into the daintiest of teacups. Khalid very nearly feels underdressed — has he ever even _owned_ white gloves? “A man of integrity.”

“Is that so?” Khalid cocks a brow at him. “And who told you that?”

“I have heard it many times,” Dedue says. “First from a machine at the district border who was blind before you gave him sight; next from an old woman baking bread who was kind enough to share a loaf with me and told me a story about how you had been the one to mend the firestarter in her oven when no other man would take on the task.”

Khalid’s nape grows a little hot. He tries to wash it away with another drink.

“I’m a machinist,” he then insists with the wave of his free hand. “It’s my trade.”

“Hm.” Dedue nods. “Yesterday I became acquainted with a coachman. It seemed to me that he commands a busy route, and yet when I asked him if he traveled to where I would like to go he told me that even the greatest riches would not convince him to take me there. I surely must have looked pitiful upon hearing the news, because then he shared your name with me. _The machinist_ , he said. _Maybe he can help you_. It is my impression that perhaps _helping_ is your trade, too.”

“Depends on who I’m helping,” Khalid counters dryly.

“Many people,” Dedue tells him. Khalid sets aside his mug to rub at his aching temples. He fucking hates riddles; hates riddlers, too. It only makes it worse when he’s dancing through a minefield. Dedue might be the master of a monologue, after all, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a member of the countless bands of merry men currently hunting Khalid out.

“Many people, huh,” he sighs. “That sounds a bit beyond my scope.”

“Your head,” Dedue then offers. Khalid scowls at him between his massaging fingers, confused. The look doesn’t seem to bother the teatime giant much at all. “Do you suffer from headaches?”

“What are you, a traveling physician?”

That’s probably a little unfair. Khalid regrets it as soon as the question slips from his mouth. Dedue might be an assassin in disguise, but he’s still a good houseguest. Khalid scrubs at his eyes before settling backwards into his seat with a sigh.

“Peppermint,” Dedue says by way of an answer, “or ginger, if you prefer the taste. Both are good for headaches.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Khalid drawls. Dedue nods, apparently satisfied.

“May I digress for a moment to tell you a story?”

Khalid shrugs at Dedue’s question, although between the migraine and the mental acrobatics he’s pulling to make sure Dedue isn’t about to slit his throat, he’s starting to lose track of just what it is they’re talking about.

“I think you might already know it well. It has to do with the war. Not now, but rather when it was still young and new. Up there, in the stars,” Dedue adds, nodding at the ceiling as he cribs from Leonie’s jab about _stargazing_ , “when Garreg Mach fell to the Empire. It was terrible for everyone, but worst of all for a single man. Some say that when the old cathedral fell that he was transformed into a beast: a golden lion, starved and frightened and made cruel by his fear.”

“Sounds like a sad story,” Khalid interjects. Dedue nods, unflustered by the man’s parched tone.

“It is. It is a tragedy. This monster was once a lamb: generous, and kind, and bright. His love for his people was only matched by their love for him. When Adrestia burned his gods they burned the hope for a brighter future through him as well. Is there any greater loss than that? The promise of something better?”

“A blind man might argue otherwise,” Khalid counters, although he knows it’s in poor sport. All the same it seems fitting; _golden lion_. Shit. Dimitri’s only got one eye, doesn’t he, and despite whatever yarn Dedue seems so committed to stringing between them— and who the hell knows _why_ , although it answers the question of if Dedue is dangerous with a sudden and resounding _yes_ — Khalid’s not convinced that the tow-headed cyclops can see much of anything at all.

“Is that not what I have said?”

“I’m not very good with fairytales,” Khalid offers with the roll of his shoulders, hoping that the lazy fidget doesn’t betray his rising nerves. “Or fables, or whatever the hell this is.”

“A legend, perhaps,” Dedue agrees, dipping his head. “But one with an important lesson. Any monster can be tamed. Curses can be lifted.”

“So what, you came here to kiss some frogs in the hopes of catching princes?” Khalid laughs, knitting his hands behind his head as he leans his chair backwards onto half of its legs. “Let me tell you something before you start telling more tall tales; I don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever it is you’re after, I can’t help you. Sorry.”

Dedue nods and sets his empty mug aside, afterwards resting his palms benignly on his broad thighs. His fingers are scarred, just like his face. It’s a mess, really, although somehow he manages to wear it well. 

“It was not right for me to come into your home and to treat you without trust,” Dedue says. “I apologize. You must understand that honesty has been a dangerous practice in these recent years. If you would, please allow me to speak more plainly. I trained for many years to be a king’s advisor. An advisor is of no value if he knows nothing, wouldn’t you agree? I made it my duty to understand this strange world of ours; the good places and the bad, the hunters and the hunted.

“In this work I once learned of a young man raised in the Second Districts who cast himself down to the dark earth in order to help the people who lived there. I cannot say that I always agreed with the means in which he did so, but in my study it was clear that his vision did not run contrary to the goals of the man I served.”

Khalid drums his fingers against the arm of his chair. For a moment they’re both silent, green eyes on green eyes as they stare each other down.

“I fell, Khalid,” Dedue continues finally, his calm, storyteller’s tone faltering slightly into something more bare-boned. “Just like so many others those five years past. I am, to those who know me best, a dead man. He—His Highness— the prince,” he sighs, his hands finally flexing to worry over a seam along the knee of his slacks, “he cannot fall, too. It will be the end of everything. Just as I know who you are, so too do I know this. I must return to Faerghus. I must help him, even if it is too late.”

 _Don’t_ , a voice inside Khalid’s head orders, tart and bright. _It’s a trap_. He can imagine the sharp teeth of one easily enough. After all, Dedue hasn’t told him anything that the most brutish headhunter wouldn’t know. Saying _of course I’ll help you_ might as well be Khalid’s way of sticking a gun into his mouth. He keeps on drumming his fingers. Dedue, apparently finished with his entreaty, keeps on staring back at him.

 _But._

“Peppermint or ginger,” Khalid echoes slowly. Dedue’s lips twitch slightly at the words. “Good for headaches, huh? Which one do you prefer?”

Dedue takes a moment to consider the question with the near-imperceptible tip of his jaw.

“Ginger,” he answers thoughtfully. “I have always had a preference for spice.”

Khalid smirks. Then he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose and working his thumbs into the sockets of his eyes as he wonders just why he’s always been so goddamned insufferably _optimistic_. A bleeding-heart, some people call him. A sucker, probably, too.

“Alright, then,” he mutters, pushing himself from his chair as he does. “Good enough.”

Dedue stands stiffly as well, his tranquil mask finally breaking with flustered surprise.

“You will help me?”

“Can’t grow ginger down here,” Khalid explains. “The soil’s too alkaline. It’ll rot before it sprouts. Can’t find it in places like Almyra either, although even if you could it’d cost a fortune. For a man from Duscur, your golden lamb certainly kept you well fed.”

“Yes,” Dedue answers, sounding a little wounded at the suggestion. At least he didn’t slip a pistol from his pocket and shoot him, Khalid supposes. He sighs again before clapping his hand on the man’s mountainous shoulder.

“I like to reward good behavior,” Khalid explains. “Besides, stopping Dimitri from burning the world down definitely qualifies as a mutual interest. If you think you can make some difference there then sure, I don’t mind giving you a ride. But it’s not going to be easy. You alright with paying for it?”

“Anything,” Dedue promises him stonily, his face suddenly drawn. “Whatever the cost.”

“Alright,” Khalid says with a shrug. He makes it sound simple, but of course it isn’t. Quite honestly, it seems to him to be a losing hand. He isn’t a smuggler, after all, and he’s anything but a Kingdom loyalist eager to help one of Dimitri’s lost dogs. But everything’s a gamble down here, and if he doesn’t up his ante he has a feeling that this game of theirs is going to have a spectacularly disastrous final round.

“Let’s go, then.”

“Now? At this very moment?”

Khalid laughs at Dedue’s breathless question. It isn’t very nice; he shouldn’t laugh at hope. 

“Don’t get too excited. This is gonna be a long haul. If you want to go up, first you’ve got to go all the way down.”


	4. Styx and Stones

If Khalid had been the man he should’ve been, he would’ve hated the Abyss. A glorified black market filled with pleasures too grimy even for the shit-caked streets of the Lower Districts, the subterranean den is as close to hell as man could make himself. Some people in the Resistance call Khalid a hero, as much as he hates the term, and surely heroes don’t belong in hell.

Of course, Khalid isn’t a hero. He’s just a man familiar with the crush of being stepped on. Even as a little boy in Almyra the air still stank, and the lights always flickered epileptic, and his meals were full of gristle instead of meat. The worst part is that little boys born in Leicester dream of places like Almyra. That sort of thing makes people hungry. Hunger takes on different forms. Soft flesh, strong drinks, medicines your mother would’ve never given you. Khalid likes those things just as much as the rest of them, because at the end of the day he _is_ the rest of them. So he doesn’t hate the Abyss, although he’s not stupid enough to think that he belongs there. It’s easier when they’re winning, and had been even simpler before Byleth had made her ascension, but now he has to put a little bit more effort into reminding himself not to fall into any sinkholes.

“Hey, handsome,” the Abyssians greet them as soon as they’ve slipped through the dark corners that drag them down into the depths. Women say the words, and then men, and machines made into both shapes. They all slink like panthers down there, not that Khalid knows what that means aside from storybook metaphors. In the Abyss they don’t bother with trying to mimic the sun. Even in the middle of the day, everything is lit neon: purple, blue, green, all flashing in a garish kaleidoscope that makes him feel drunk as soon as his eyes adjust to the dark. The candy-cellophane light makes the whores look ethereal. Ethereal panthers. Right.

“Been awhile,” another purrs, fingers slipping along his sleeves. “Who’ve you brought this time?”

“I like them big,” another promises.

“Two for one?” a third suggests.

Khalid pulls a thin cylinder the size of his thumb from his pocket and depresses the top until it’s nearly half-size. The whores stutter mid-sentence, gazing at him a moment longer before their eyes grow unfocused, as if they’ve just realized that they’d been staring off into space. Some of them shrug. Others shift their too-short skirts and ruffle their hair before they turn and walk away.

“It scrambles their sensors,” Khalid explains to a bewildered Dedue. He pockets the cylinder and nods down the street ahead. “Call it an invisibility cloak. Stick close if you’re not interested in having a good time.”

“I see,” Dedue says uneasily. Khalid smirks. He doubts that. Not so many whores in Faerghus, or at least not ones like that. The Blaiddyds had made too much of a sport out of splitting machines apart. The ones made from flesh and bone never last very long, not even in a place like here. Not that they last long in other professions, either. The war, you know?

“That is a helpful device,” Dedue says as they walk. Khalid nods.

“Sure,” he replies.

“Do you have many more like it?”

“Are you in the market?” Khalid counters. He likes Dedue, he’s decided, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to roll out the red carpet for him towards all of his nefarious deeds. Dedue seems to understand. He nods his head in that benign little way of his that reads as respectful, even though Khalid doubts that he really deserves it.

They pass by glittering storefronts and dank hovels all crowded together along the same singular boulevard. It’s funny, really. In many ways the Abyss looks better than the places above it. Yuri runs a tight ship. At least if you get your throat slit down here, someone will have the hometown pride to clean up afterwards. Khalid and Dedue drift through all of it like unbothered fishes through a pack of sharks, grateful for the benevolent shroud of Khalid’s scrambler. It doesn’t take them long to get to the bauble at the Abyss’ heart. Dedue stares up at the massive building, all fanciful arches and swooping balconies like some sort of obscene palace, and Khalid can’t help but wonder if it makes him feel homesick. That doesn’t seem right, of course, but he can’t put a finger on how else to word it.

“Hey, my favorite bleeding heart,” a voice calls out from the ambling crowd gathered at the forward gates. 

“Balthus,” Khalid guesses, and sure enough, he’s right. Balthus bulls his way between two stoned girls fighting over a bottle in order to offer Khalid an exaggerated wave. Khalid doesn’t much mind him, to be honest. Balthus is always tearing himself up, obedient hound dog that he is for Yuri’s whimsy, and Khalid’s the one he goes to in order to get put back together again. That sort of thing helps to build a bond. _Indebtedness_ is another word for it, but it doesn’t sound nearly as poetic.

“Been a while,” Balthus says once he’s made it closer to them. Khalid shrugs.

“Busy,” he tells him.

“Busy making friends?” Balthus asks, nodding his chin in Dedue’s direction.

“You could call it that. Our _friend_ available for a little chat?”

“Sure,” Balthus tells him, crossing his arms with the assurance, “soon enough. Why rush? You want something to drink?”

“No, thanks. None for him, either,” Khalid quickly adds, not sure if even Dedue’s monstrous dimensions could stand up to the rocket fuel they brew down here, and that says nothing for the liquor.

“Aw, you’re never any fun,” Balthus goads, laughing. He strings his arm around Khalid’s shoulders and steers him towards the door ahead. “It’d do you good to loosen up. I hear that the world’s on fire. You want a girl?”

“No thanks, Balthus.”

“What about you?” Balthus grins over his shoulder at Dedue. “Nothing takes the edge off like a good pair of tits. You look like you’re _all_ edges, friend.”

“No, thank you,” Dedue replies politely. Balthus snorts and shakes his head.

“I’m looking to buy,” Khalid insists, shrugging free of Balthus’ arm and walking more swiftly towards Yuri’s inner sanctum. Balthus cocks one of his hairy brows.

“You’ve always got to buy, and you’ve never got the credits. Some would say that’s a bad deal.”

A frustrated spark ignites in Khalid’s chest and quickly tempers into a fire.

“You owe me,” he insists with the jab of his finger. “Unless you want to drag yourself up to Shambhala the next time you lose one of your fucking arms.”

Balthus flexes the limb in question, grinning all the while.

“Sure, why not? Nothing wrong with visiting mommy dearest,” Balthus says. “Anyway, I’m not the one calling the shots. Just saying that Yuri might not be as interested in IOUs anymore. Dire times, you know?”

“They’re always dire,” Khalid answers grimly. He doesn’t wait for Balthus’ answer. He storms ahead close enough for the nearby door to slot open and walks swiftly through, trusting Dedue to be bright enough to follow behind. Balthus’ laughter follows after them as Khalid begins to thread his way through the smoke-filled labyrinth inside. His laughter isn’t so cheery, isn’t so kind. Khalid has to give it to Balthus: the machine’s learned a lot about the nuances of acting like a genuine asshole.

“Khalid,” Yuri purrs in welcome once they arrive, hidden in the perfume of something bewitchingly narcotic and scrolling marquees of candy-cane light. Khalid squeezes his way between a pair of dancing girls covered in some sort of slick, firefly sparkle and finally finds the man languidly spread across an ostentatious seat. “It’s been a while.”

“Not so long,” Khalid sighs.

“Who’s this?”

“A new acquaintance,” Khalid tells him, relieved that Dedue kept close enough to now find himself a half-step behind them. He hears Dedue clear his throat.

“My name is Dedue,” he offers. Khalid cringes. So much for subterfuge.

“De _due_ ,” Yuri tests slowly. Khalid watches a mischievous grin spill across his painted face. _Shit_. That’s never good. “I see. How nice it is to make new friends. Here I was thinking that _we_ were friends, Khalid, and yet it seems that I was mistaken. Your ledger’s in the red, you know. Why do I have a feeling that you haven’t come here to pay up?”

“I’ll give you want you want,” Khalid answers, “but I need an advance.”

“You aren’t the one who’s supposed to say that,” Yuri sniffs. He spins something shimmering between his fingers. A dagger, Khalid realizes. What a fucking farce. Yuri’s always loved the dramatics of old antiques. Khalid wonders what it would feel like stuck in his back when he leaves. Probably the same as it always does in all of the times it’s happened before.

“Fine,” Yuri sighs, swooping the blade in the air theatrically. He stands and nods towards a far corner. “I’ll show you what I have to offer. I have something for you, as it so happens. Consider it a gift. You must’ve had a birthday or two in the time that we’ve known each other.”

Khalid frowns. There’s nothing more dangerous than a gift, as far as he’s concerned, particularly not one picked out by Yuri.

“Is he coming, too?” Yuri asks, nodding at Dedue as they begin to trail through the crowded room.

“He’s part of the deal.”

“What a patron you are,” Yuri drawls. “They’ll hang you by your deep pockets, you know.”

“Yeah, probably,” Khalid replies dryly.

They step into a room so distinct from the one they’ve left that it gives Khalid vertigo. The smoke is gone, as well as the hum of music and laughter and moaning. It’s been replaced by a clean white light and endless rows of tidy things. Crates, shelves, tables lined with everything an imaginative man could muster: jewelry, food, clothes, weapons. Yuri directs them towards a neat space dominated by a long table not unlike the one crowding Khalid’s own quarters.

“Shit,” Khalid mutters.

There’s a body on the table, naked and pink beneath the sterile lights. It’s a man’s, well-formed and muscular and young. He could call it _handsome_ if not for the fact that the head’s a mess of blackened wires and melted metal. The destruction’s so cartoonish that it makes Khalid’s stomach flip.

“What the hell happened to him?”

“Imperial soldiers,” Yuri explains. “Some of my best customers when they’re looking for a good time. Well. _Generous_ , not _best_ ,” he corrects, his lips turning into a soured scowl. “You want him? He’s a new model. Pleasure class. You know they always have the best parts. Wish they would’ve been less selective for their target practice, but those damned bald-headed birds always want the pretty ones.”

Khalid steps closer to the table and presses a finger to the faceless machine’s slack palm.

“Don’t you want me to reboot him?”

“Too late for that. They wiped him. Must’ve been talking about something they’re not supposed to talk about while they were rearranging him.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, well,” Yuri sighs, “people die all of the time. You want him?”

Khalid hates it. He’s a machinist, not an undertaker. Sometimes he wonders if he could manage the truth of everything, if he ever took a moment to take stock of just how low he’s gone.

“Yeah,” he sighs, thinking about sunflowers and Ignatz’s lame arm. “I’ll take him.”

“Good. Better you than someone else.”

Yuri nearly sounds sad at that. Khalid watches him tidy a tangled mess hanging from the dead machine’s ruined head and reminds himself that the man isn’t so different than him, in the end. Maybe they aren’t monsters, and if they are, it’s only because the entire world’s so fucking beastly.

“So,” Yuri continues with a sharp inhale, “what else can I do for you?”

“I need agarthium,” Khalid replies. Yuri laughs.

“What else can I get you? Unicorn tears?”

_Asshole_. He takes it back about the monsters. 

“Do you have it or not?”

Yuri makes a show of sighing before turning on his heel. They follow him down a narrow corridor of more neat-packed shelves. Yuri’s fingers draw along the contents, bobbing over smooth steel and ornate antiquities with a fond intimacy. Finally he stops deep within the maze and turns to face an unremarkable grey box. He eases it to the edge of the shelf and flips open the lid to unveil a gunmetal bullion.

“I don’t have much,” Yuri admits. “Slithyre gets antsy when shipments go unaccounted for. How much do you need?”

“That’s enough,” Khalid says after he eyes the unimpressive thing. Yuri smirks and snaps the lid of the box closed.

“I don’t know,” Yuri wavers. “I don’t think you’ve got the credit for something like this.”

“I’ve got credit,” Khalid growls. “I’ve got better than that for the things I’ve done for you.”

“Oh yeah? I could say the same about you. Seems to me that we’re on an even keel.” Yuri plants a hand on his hip and looks him over. His eyes dart sideways in Dedue’s direction before settling back again. “Say,” he adds slyly, “speaking of Slithyre, one of their pushers came to visit the other day. Mentioned something about a lost asset. A very interesting asset, and one that they just so happen to be very interested in.”

“Oh yeah? You taking orders from corporate, now?”

Yuri laughs.

“Am I supposed to feel guilty about that? They could say the same about you, you know. I’ve heard that you’re an agitator. That’s a dangerous word.” Yuri’s eyes flash, turned predatory by the suggestion. “In any case, I didn’t say that it was _their_ asset. They came to me because they know that I’ve got a knack for stolen things. Not that I gave them much for an answer. Did pique my interest, though. They said it was very _dangerous_. That word again — reminds me of _you_ , you know?”

Khalid shifts on his heels. Goddamned Yuri. He always underestimates him. It’s a stupid mistake. How else would a man like him lord over a place like this? Khalid fights the urge to peek at Dedue to gauge his response to Yuri’s veiled suggestions. Khalid himself knows exactly what _asset_ Yuri’s toying over, of course, and just as sure about that as he is that Yuri knows that Khalid knows, too.

“I didn’t tell them anything,” Yuri reassures him wolfishly. “Before you start asking for favors, you might consider that.”

Khalid sighs, long, drawn out, until he can feel his lungs crumple like wet paper.

“What do you want, Yuri?”

Yuri laughs again. 

“A piece of whatever you’re hunting,” he replies. “Agarthium...well, what’s a well-endowed man like you need something like that for?”

Khalid frowns. Yuri’s never much worried about what Khalid does after he buys his wares, or at least he hadn’t before — before Slithyre had come calling, that is. _Shit_.

“Or does it have to do with your new friend?” Yuri continues, tilting his chin at Dedue. He turns to stare the man down. “Just who are you, anyway?”

“I am Dedue,” Dedue replies. That makes Khalid smile, which helps, at least. Weird fellow.

“You from Duscur?”

“Yes,” Dedue says. Yuri hums.

“I hear that not even the Duscurian aristocracy qualified for Crests,” Yuri muses aloud. “Old history now, but it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

“Come on, Yuri,” Khalid snaps. “Are you going to give it to me or not?”

“Sure,” Yuri replies. He spreads his palms open at him like the sweetest invitation, although his grin is positively poisonous. “But if you’re headed where I think you’re headed, I’d recommend that you save me the trouble and shoot yourself without wasting my time. They’re hunting you, you know. You think Slithyre doesn’t get what it wants?”

Khalid snatches the box of agarthium in lieu of a reply. Yuri scoffs but doesn’t stop him, just watches him as he shoves the box into his coat pocket and turns on his heel.

“Thanks, Yuri. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good thing you’ve got such a sharp mind,” Yuri quips.

_Good thing_. It’s a funny phrase, an antique just like Yuri’s dagger. Doesn’t seem like it makes much sense anymore.

* * *

“Yuri is a friend of yours?” Dedue asks later, once they’ve escaped to the surface again and helped themselves to another round of rancid coffee. Khalid can still smell the Abyss on his jacket, but he doesn’t have anything big enough to offer Dedue in terms of a change in wardrobe, and it seems too rude to slip out of his own clothes without the same option for his guest. He does his best to ignore the petroleum-honey smell of all of that poison they burn down there, but between the coffee and the sulfur of the steady rain outside it’s not like he’s got much in the way of better options.

“You could call him that,” Khalid answers noncommittally. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”

“I imagine he would be a helpful connection in your line of work,” Dedue says. _What line of work is that_ , Khalid wants to ask him, but he knows better than to angle for an answer he might not like.

“Sure,” he says instead. He swirls his mug in his hand and takes a drink as he strolls towards his work table. The agarthium is waiting for him there, just as benign as ever in its ugly little box. The dead machine will come later, once Balthus sobers up enough to behave himself topside.

“I hope you have not put yourself in debt on my account,” Dedue continues. Khalid smirks. A little late for that.

“I am in so much debt,” he says, slow and deliberate as he turns the agarthium bullion between his fingers, eyes studying every minuscule fiber in the grain, “that it doesn’t really matter anymore. Running two hundred credits short can kill a man, but twenty thousand? That makes you an institution. Bankruptcy has a way of keeping you alive.”

“I have never considered it like that,” Dedue admits. It’s another thing that doesn’t surprise Khalid. He can’t imagine Prince Dimitri has ever been on the bad end of a loanshark. They’re both silent for a moment while Khalid continues his inspection, finally setting the bullion aside in order to hunt through a nearby toolbox.

“You can make a Crest out of something like this?” Dedue asks. Clever fellow, but it took him long enough.

“Not really.” Khalid takes another sip of coffee. “You’re not going to start a new storied house out of it, to say the least. But it’ll trick the sensors. Just enough,” he adds with the wave of a wrench he’s fished from his collection. “It’ll degrade fast, so don’t keep it for a souvenir, either. There are two sensors between here and the pearly gates. This will get you through them.”

Dedue nods.

“You are familiar with Faerghus?”

“It’s not so hard to be familiar with something that’s always hovering over your head,” Khalid replies dryly. He selects a small metal housing from a drawer and brings it to the table along with the wrench and a pair of pliers. 

“Hm,” Dedue says. He watches Khalid as he continues to piece together what he needs to build his counterfeit. “And you,” the giant continues, “will you make one for yourself as well?”

“Who says I’m headed that far north?”

“You will need to pass the border scanners to bring us in range of the Kingdom,” Dedue answers. It answers some other questions for Khalid, too. Not many opportunities left to prove that Dedue’s lying about the royal lapdog gig. “Are you a Crest bearer?”

“Step back,” is what Khalid uses as an answer. Dedue obeys, sea-glass eyes watching with interest as Khalid takes a hammer and unceremoniously pulverizes the agarthium into gravel. Next Khalid pulls a spool of copper wire from beneath the table and begins to weave it into a netted tangle with quick cocks of his fingers.

“His Highness has a Crest,” Dedue offers suddenly. It’s unexpected. Khalid does his best to keep his lips flat and his focus on his work. “Some say that it is a curse. The type of curse that drives men mad. Do you ever find yourself feeling mad, Khalid?”

Khalid huffs a rueful breath through his nostrils but doesn’t reply. Dedue waits for it for a moment, patient and polite as always, before he purses his lips to carry on.

“I often wonder if a man can truly be mad if he is aware that he is being driven to it,” Dedue muses. “If he can see it approach, and run from it, or brace for it, and prepare. Is that madness? Is it different than any other breed of temper?” 

“There’s nothing more dangerous than a king with a bad temper,” Khalid drawls. He sees Dedue nod from the corner of his eye.

“Yes,” Dedue agrees. “You are right, I think. But does it make him a madman?”

Khalid rubs his thumb across the face of the little medallion he’s made. It’s funny how the most sophisticated things can look so medieval. Then again, maybe that’s the art of it. They still hang people in Faerghus. What’s more ancient than that?

“Dimitri is a good man,” Dedue suddenly offers. Here it is: the heart of everything that’s been hiding behind his placid politeness. He sounds so honest that it makes Khalid’s chest ache. “There was a time when you offered His Highness an allegiance. I remember it. Do not turn your back on peace now. This world cannot survive another conquerer, Khalid. Reach out your hand again and I will see to it that he grasps it. I will show you the man that I know him to be.”

Khalid sighs and slides the counterfeit Crest across the tabletop towards Dedue.

“Let’s go and see him, then,” he relents, although he regrets each letter as it slips off his tongue. “Let’s go see your gentle king.”

* * *

Khalid finds another airbike for Dedue. It’s a tin can compared to his own, and looks like some kind of circus tricycle between the man’s thighs, but Dedue does a serviceable enough job of keeping himself upright. Khalid slips on his camouflaged hood and kicks off the pavement to lead him up, up, up. Dedue’s own face is naked to the wind. A final test. If he’s the beloved advisor he says he is, surely Faerghus will greet him with open arms once he slips past their apathetic sensors. If he isn’t, it’s not like he’ll be the first person Khalid watches die by Kingdom decree. 

The air smells like smoke before they’ve even made it to the Second Districts. It’s not a good sign, but they’re running on borrowed time. In five hours Dedue’s homemade Crest will be nothing but an oversized coat button. Besides, it’s not like either of them is unused to the bouquet of war in the air. It makes Khalid more nervous when they find Almyra in one piece — and there’s something sinful about that, he knows, not to be relieved — but maybe throwing Dedue into a battlefield is the best plan he’s got. Surely no one will notice a little silver fly like Khalid zipping through certifiable chaos.

Maybe he’ll make it back to Leicester in time to meet Balthus, even, and to accept his newest grim bounty. To be honest, Khalid hasn’t made up his mind if he has the heart to harvest Yuri’s dead machine for parts. Maybe he’ll just bury him. It’s not like the soil isn’t already poisoned. What’s a bit more heavy metal? Who knows. Maybe some new flower will grow from the machine’s pitiful roots, as ugly as the rest of everything, and perfumed by something foul enough to block out the rest of the stink.

Gods. Khalid can’t keep on running like this. Always, all of the time, and always with enough tension coursing through him that he feels like his spine’s about to crawl through his skin. And what the hell is he doing, thinking about flowers while he watches the clouds mutate from smog into smoke, and leading another wolf back to its den while he’s a gods-fucking-damned _sheep_? Or a deer. He smirks at that. That’s what Lorenz calls him, anyways. He has to give him credit. There’s something marginally less pitiful about a stag than a ram. At least they’re hunted instead of slaughtered. Right?

Shit.

Who knows.

“What is that?” Dedue asks once they’ve cleared Almyra and have the Upper Districts in their sights. Khalid searches for what he means, and finds it in the pitch dripping off the concrete like ink spilled into a glass of water.

“What, you didn’t smell it?” Khalid shouts over his shoulder at him. He nudges his bike slightly sidewards so that they can make a less direct approach. “Somebody’s waged war on your prince. Don’t tell me you aren’t used to it.”

“No,” Dedue agrees grimly. He wrenches his fist around his throttle to keep pace. The scanner’s red halo is already upon them. They don’t have enough time for Khalid to feel anxious. All he can think is _maybe I should have gotten some rest, first_ and _hope Yuri didn’t fuck us over_ before they zip through the veil. Dedue doesn’t disintegrate. That’s a good fucking sign for Khalid’s craftsmanship.

“The battle must be in the southern sector,” Khalid observes once they’ve gained more ground. Dedue pushes faster until he’s at his side.

“Gaspard,” he agrees. He nods his chin forward. “Over there.”

“Lead the way.” 

Dedue does. Khalid checks to make sure that his mask’s on smooth and tight. He scans his bike afterwards to be certain that he hasn’t made any other mistakes that’ll mark him for who he is. No. He’s just a ghost, as far as Faerghus will be concerned. Good thing. It’s certainly the right place.

“There!” Dedue shouts. Khalid follows the point of his finger to a tight knot of people crowded behind a building staged just before the pitted no-man’s land that separates the Kingdom from Adrestia. Even without his Crest, it’d be easy enough for Khalid to spot Dimitri’s golden hair. The prince is dressed in the blue glow of a holo-shield, one of the many military necessities that are common up here at this height and all but divine down below. Very little can get through a holo-shield, and certainly not the whizzing bolts of laserlight bullets currently peppering Dimitri’s position.

Dimitri’s holding one of the few things that can. Claude eyes the mean looking spear glowing red-hot against the smoke and feels the bottom of his stomach ice over. Here’s another thing _medieval_ about how they live. No need for science when you’ve got a wicked blade. How many men has Dimitri cut apart? What’d Dedue called him? A lamb?

“His Highness,” Dedue gasps, his breath tight between his teeth. He pushes forward on his bike just as Khalid pulls back. Dedue doesn’t notice, of course. The nature of their journey has changed. No doubt the man’s forgotten all about him in exchange for the hunchbacked creature gesturing wildly at the Imperial company currently pressing them on all sides. So much for new friends.

Khalid revs the throttle and nearly turns before a shock of mint green distracts him. A spike of relief worms its way between all the intuition ordering him to run. There Byleth is, looking as fierce as she always does in her own mythical suit-of-arms. She looks at home on a battlefield. It’s always bothered him.

He doesn’t have the chance to fixate on it now. He sees a flash just before he hears the boom of a missile lurching from Adrestia and crashing quickly into its neighbor. It’s a small, clumsy thing, uncharacteristic for Imperial firepower. Dimitri must have happened upon a two-bit battalion. Lucky them. They’ll have plenty of new heads to mount on the walls.

Khalid pulls back on his bike to ride the shockwave spilling from the battlefield. When he rights himself again he feels a pair of frozen hands grip greedily at his heart. That blast’d had no hope of hurting Byleth, but clearly the prince wasn’t so well informed. He’s hunched over her now, protecting her against the smoke with the broad span of his crooked shoulders. Khalid can see the white stripes of her fingers gripping at his jacket.

Khalid’s never been convinced this war is much more than propaganda, and here’s the winning shot: a warrior-king and the Valkyrie who’s blessed him. Khalid can picture her stamped on the fucking money, even. Truth. Justice. The Queen.

He doesn’t wait to watch Dedue make his homecoming. Doesn’t bother to hold out for the end of the battle, either. It’s already clear how all of it will end, at least tonight. They’ll toast their king for their victory. No doubt Byleth will be at his side. Khalid can nearly taste the wine. He turns his bike with the kick of his leg and points himself back down into the dark pit from where he’s come. 


End file.
